Charles Hensler

A Certain Time and Place

You remember it all
as a painting—rocks arranged
in a dusty field, heavy carts drawn,
suffering in the cold or suffering, warmth
in small places, someone’s gold
locked in a box or rosemary
in a generous bread, a plastic cup
tumbling in a carnival wind

and all along the star fires
burning—fierce, far above the cars driven
and the planes flown, the moon
traveled, the double twist of genes
a flag unfurled

and once a child’s hand
like a sparrow in your own.

How effortlessly
the street corner arrives: a square of winter
dusk, a signal, a light that can only fall—
the strangers waiting to cross.

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Charles Hensler lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Emerge Literary Journal, Rust & Moth, The Shore, Parentheses, River Heron Review, One Art, Stone Circle Review and others.