D. Dina Friedman
D. Dina Friedman’s recent work includes a short-story collection, Immigrants, (Creators Press, 2023) and a poetry chapbook Here in Sanctuary—Whirling (Querencia Press, 2024). She is also the author of the chapbook Wolf in the Suitcase (Finishing Line Press) and two young adult novels: Escaping Into the Night (Simon and Schuster) and Playing Dad’s Song (Farrar Straus Giroux). Dina has published widely in literary journals including Rattle, Salamander, The Sun, Mass Poetry, Chautauqua Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Cider Press Review, Lilith, Negative Capability and Rhino and received six Pushcart Prize and two Best of the Net nominations.
IT DOESN’T MATTER
if the earth’s axis is on a tilt, if the universe
is expanding—or not, if the Red Sox win
or you botch up the piano piece—and you will.
It doesn’t matter if no one listens to you play,
or everyone does, and makes raspberries
even if they’re pretending to play with the baby
who’s also making raspberries. It doesn’t matter
if your words jump off the page, worming
into people’s hearts or die in a slow, ignored fade.
It doesn’t matter if you die. We all will, sometime,
or if the dog is pawing at you when you’re trying
to write a poem, or the cat pounces on the computer,
convinced he’s the better poet. Isn’t randomness
the name of the game, like Jackson Pollack
pretending he had a plan for where the paint landed.
It doesn’t matter if there are no plans, or reasons.
Truly, there are no reasons for wars
regardless of who says, “he started it.”
And it does matter that people die in wars
and on the streets. It does matter that an AR-15
can knock off dozens with one trigger pull
of an angry teen. It matters when the geraniums die,
even if that’s part of the natural order of things.
It will matter to me when I die, and perhaps
to the people who love me, even if in the great scheme
of the universe, expanding or not, I’m just a speck
on the globe. Tilting.
