When I posted about Gwendolyn Brooks, I did not realize it was World Poetry Day. Apparently, it is. Fortuitous. I am always writing poems, most of which are kind of cruddy. Here is one that isn’t so bad, which I wrote a while back about my time living in Istanbul. True story.

Faith

In the small shops

in my old neighbourhood in Istanbul

the shopkeepers would use a battered shoebox

as a cash register. They would leave me alone

with it – no locks

in sight, as they went down the road to get me a tea, a cay,

sweet and dark like amber fossilized into stone.

They had faith that I was good. They were lucky. In the main

I was. I was me: not perfect but never one

to spit at trust.