Stephen Kampa

Such a Human Gesture

 

Suppose I lived another hundred years:
Still I might lack the necessary skills
To put to words the way his ten–speed’s gears,

With brown metallic teeth and oil–smooth spills
Of chain, compose a beatific rose
Like Dante’s, but mechanical and gritty—

The sort of vision everybody knows
Will one day find no place in the Just City,
Making him homeless then, as he is now,

As his unlaundered clothes and plastic bags
Of nothing can attest. Could grace allow
This rancid grease–splotched rabblement of rags

A lasting spot in what, perforce, is fair?
Where is there room for how he reaches back
To touch the black bag bungeed to his rack,

To make sure all his emptiness is there?

 

 

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Stephen Kampa is the author of four collections of poetry: Cracks in the Invisible (2011), Bachelor Pad (2014), Articulate as Rain (2018), and World Too Loud to Hear (2023). His work has appeared in the Yale Review, Cincinnati Review, Southwest Review, Hopkins Review, Poetry Northwest, Subtropics, and Smartish Pace. He was also included in Best American Poetry 2018 and Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic (2020). During the spring of 2021, he was the writer in residence at the Amy Clampitt House. He teaches at Flagler College and is currently the poetry editor of Able Muse.