• h u m a n •

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk

down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs

to let you by.

Or how strangers still say “bless you”

when someone sneezes, a leftover

from the Bubonic plague.

“Don’t die,” we are saying.

And sometimes, when you spill lemons

from your grocery bag, someone else will help you

pick them up.

Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.

We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,

and to say thank you to the person handing it.

To smile at them and for them to smile back.

For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us .

We have so little of each other, now.

So far from tribe and fire.

Only these brief moments of exchange

Small Kindness ~ Danusha Laméris