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PAUL JUHASZ
March 19, 2020
He’s there every morning.
Silhouetted in the sun’s vanguard,
hackey-sacking in the parking lot corner,
as I drive by on the way to work.
He’s there every morning.
Manicured beard,
the sheen of the morning’s nascent rays off his shaved head,
the lithe grace of his athleticism keeping the small leather bag constantly in play.
Master of such an improbable game.
He’s there every morning.
As we watch Italy collapse.
As bodies are taken from a Kirkland nursing home.
As schools, restaurants, all public venues close,
As we wrestle with our new realities,
Self-quarantine, social distance, shelter-in-place.
He’s there every morning.
Focused, steady, peaceful.
Alone in the corner of the parking lot,
Passing the bean-filled sack from foot to foot,
Never letting it hit the ground.
Sharing his grace until we can re-collect our own.
He’s there every morning.
As much a part of the morning’s benediction
as the purple-orange glints of sunrise,
or the warbling song of birds.
PAUL JUHASZ has read at dozens of conferences and festivals across the country, including Scissortail and the Woody Guthrie Festival. His work has appeared in bioStories, Red River Review, Voices de la Luna, Dragon Poet Review, Ain’t Gonna Be Treated This Way, and Speak Your Mind, and his comic journal, Fulfillment: Diary of an Amazonian Picker, chronicling his seven-month sentence at Amazon, has been published in abridged form in The Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, then serialized in Voices de la Luna. He currently lives in Oklahoma City.
