There is never enough time to see everything
in the museums we visit most often.

I planted ten packets of seeds
and only these sprouted,

grew five feet high
and blew facedown in last night’s storm.

Watching my husband chop an onion,
I think of all the poets no one reads.

Rooted in air, rooted in smoke,
washed away in silt-bearing floods—

“Don’t worry, it’s firm,” I call out
to my four-year-old godson

as my right leg sinks to the knee
in the mound of dirt I’m climbing.

Brad Richard is the author of four collections of poems, most recently Parasite Kingdom (The Word Works, 2019). His fourth chapbook, In Place, has recently been published in the Robin Becker Series by Seven Kitchens Press. He lives, writes, and occasionally teaches in New Orleans. More at bradrichard.org.

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