It’s in the pencils
that I find you today
God, tucked between the points
and the possibilities. You smell
like wood and things pressed too long
between heavy objects
to be anything other than hard.
Today I will give
away the permission to cry
out to myself, to others
mothers, children, men and miseries
each aching to express something
of what it means to find ourselves
between the pointed barrels
hoping what you’re going to write
is something other than
lead, hoping the violence
against us will stop, today,
and we will find what is being written
by the sharp edges of lives
is love, and that there is softness
enough at the other end of our questions
that they will be (we will be?)
rubbed smooth by grace.