Human Interest Story by Hayden Saunier

Human Interest Story

Always the final bit on the newscast,
a tiny Tinkerbell-sized light
lifted from the dank bottom
of the jam-packed Pandora’s Box
of horrors just unleashed at us
with shrieking chyron banners
and pop-up advertisements
for which heinous true crime story
or CSI procedural is coming up,
but for 30 seconds we see puppies
rescued from a storm drain,
a wedding ring returned
to a war bride after fifty years
lost in a Nebraska cornfield,
and last night, a man with one arm
paralyzed was offered a simple loop
to bind his dead arm to his working one
in such a way that he could now
raise both arms above his head
in a ballerina’s O, lift them over
his young son’s body to hug him
back, and I can’t stop seeing
the looks on both their faces, lit
so brightly from within, it’s hauled me
through this whole next day on hope.

*

Hayden Saunier is the author of five books of poetry; her most recent is A Cartography of Home (Terrapin: 2021). Her work has been published in 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bracken, Pedestal, Thrush, and Virginia Quarterly Review, featured on The Writers Almanac, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and has been awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize and the Rattle Poetry Prize, among others. She is the founder/director of the interactive poetry reading, No River Twice. www.haydensanier.com @Hayden_Saunier