This is a true story.
A ten year old girl let go a balloon in Northern England
bearing her name and her address.
It traveled a hundred miles south, against the prevailing wind,
to the hand of another ten year old girl
with exactly the same name.
Of all the chances, of all the random currents of air,
it flew straight into the hands of the one
who didn’t even know she was waiting for it.
A statistician, hearing the story, says that
something like this was bound to happen
to someone
eventually.
Poetry is like that.
Set a poem loose in the world and it wanders
losing itself in the ocean
falling in a stream, catching in a tree
but sometimes coming to exactly the right place.
It's bound to happen eventually,
and every time is a miracle.
When the words find the one
who doesn’t even know she is waiting for them,
in that instant,
two chubby hands a hundred miles or years apart
hold tight to the string of the same balloon.
