My Bonsai Tree on the Southern Window Ledge in the Laundry Room
To the nearly four-hundred-year-old Yamaki white pine bonsai that survived the atomic blast in Hiroshima and now lives in an arboretum museum in Washington, DC

This small juniper. One clay pot
awash in moss weathered for five springs
below my garden Buddha. To take on
another green life gives me pause.

Think first. With each tender snip,
practice what is skillful, kind.
A twig gone. A fraction
of a branch.

Can I be here day-to-day with water
through Augusts of certain drought
to drizzle rituals of commitment?
See it as if it lives on a mountain top?

Tiny: lady bugs at winter’s window,
Mom’s brass thimble inlaid
with delftware of turning windmills,
and my green cat’s-eye marble. Some rationale

for miniatures, a silhouette of relief when our globe
withers with suicide bombs or for a Yemini girl
who dies of cholera in a flapping tent. This twisted juniper,
its spare shadow laid across the wash room shelf.