Pocket Poem #6

After posting “Taking Refuge in My Saddle” yesterday, I realized that the day, June 1, also signified the start of PRIDE month. As I reflected on “pride + pedaling,” especially against the backdrop of all that has taken place in just the last 24 hours—a shooting in Tulsa, Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee, and the publishing of Elliot Page’s “ultimate joy”—Nikki Giovanni’s collection of poems, Bicycles: Love Poems, all but jumped off the shelf.  Published only two years after Cho Seung-Hui shot and killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007, Giovanni poetically ponders the shootings that rocked her campus, her rediscovery of romantic love, and her grief following the transitions of her mother and sister.  For me, her poem, “Bicycles” reminds me that in the darkest moments of life, the touch of my love in the middle of the night, is all that I need to keep moving, to keep loving, to keep being in this wild, wobbly, and wholly wonderful world.

For Joellen.

Bicycles, by Nikki Giovanni

Midnight poems are bicycles
Taking us on safer journeys
Than 
  jets
Quicker journeys
Than walking
But never as beautiful
A 
  journey
As my back
Touching you under the quilt

Midnight 
  poems
Sing a sweet song
Saying everything
Is all 
  right

Everything
Is
Here for us
I reach out
To catch the 
  laughter

The dog thinks
I need a kiss

Bicycles move
With 
the  flow
Of the earth
Like a cloud
So quiet
In the October 
sky
Like  licking ice cream
From a cone
Like knowing you
Will 
always
Be  there

All day long I wait
For the sunset

The 
first star
The  moon rise

I move
To a 
  midnight
Poem
Called
You
Propping
Against
The 
  dangers