You Better Be Lightning (Button Poetry)

by Andrea Gibson

I could see the war behind your eyelids, how you tore the covers off every morning like a kid unwrapping a gift. Like the dawn of a simple day was everything you’d ever put on your Christmas list.

My grandfather was a clock who stopped before I met him.

To make up for lost time, you need only to put down the grudge you are holding so you can pick up the phone and say, How many days did we need each other at the same time without knowing it?

If you are going to be anything in the world tonight, you better be lightning. You better find something in you honest enough to strike them.

Why are the keys to our future in the hands of those who have the longest commutes from their heads to their hearts? Whose greed is the smog that keeps us from seeing our own nature and the sweetness we are here to protect?

We need so much less than we take. We owe so much more than we give.

For years to come, nothing will have the potential to devastate me more than listening to a child try to make her life sound easier than it is.

if your own story is one you aren’t sure you can survive, remove whatever sharpness you can from another person’s life.

I am the only one out of the two of us who survived you, and I survived you so beautifully.

I am so much of who I dreamed I’d be when I grew up, and what does the boy you once were think of the man you became?

Can you see it? I know you can. Everyone can see who they were supposed to be. It’s the readiest grief in the world.