#small kindnesses

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 pass. / We have so little of each other, now. So far / from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. / What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these / fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, / have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

A warm cloak, in a code dungeon.