Clear Glass Poem by Allen Braden

Maybe I shouldn't even attempt this,
remaking a made thing as others have.
It was a day you would have pronounced
the weather as nondenominational.
I sifted crushed gravel on 15th S. W.
for some token from your gray life
and one bit of weathered glass surfaced,

a piece of the picture window maybe
from a boy long ago playing ball
where he was strictly forbidden to do so.
Honest as a fifth of vodka, cheap or otherwise,
you would have loved deeply such irony
found in this one humble chip of glass,
broken and still able to magnify the light.