Monday Poems: "Beside the Road While Our Nation Is at War" -- by Kim Stafford

In our son's young hand,
borrowed from the ground in California,
five acorns glisten and roll.
"Dad! These could be bullets!
Will you help me make a gun?"

His eyes look up into mine.

"Or Dad! They could be magic
seeds! Will you help me make
a bag with a hole--so
they drop along the path
and grow?" I take his hand in mine.

"Little friend, we must decide."

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Kim Stafford is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including Having Everything Right: Essays of Place and The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures. He founded and teaches at the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon.

This poem is printed in New Poets of the American West, Lowell Jaeger, ed.