Adoption by Daniel Barry

peering out my
side window
I saw
eyes erupting
as they hazed
into mine.
a child—
African American,
open maw
with a
blue bicycle,
helmet resting
on his precious,
parsnip pale head,
no more than
a meter from mine.
I had to swallow the
street with laughter—
his wheels’ momentum
broke before they could
skate my bus’s
hand-me-down street;
the hand of his
contracted mother,
young and light,
in no need of
a witness,
fiercely cradled
the child’s heart,
the selfish gene
bamboozled,
because, in fact, this one
did not sprout
from her own womb.

Daniel Barry is an emerging poet whose lifeblood as a writer is his spiritual life. Emily Dickenson is his instructor of symbolism and representative allusion. He noticed that he despised this death of language, the tendency to filter speech into overused vernacular. In this grappling of language, he finds joy.