Jonathan Bracker

Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2021

Who We Are

Jonathan Bracker

I am two people. How about you, Aren’t you two people, too?

Think about it. No matter what your age, There may be two of you: One courageous, confronting Dragons perhaps daily, and one Frightened, ready to rush pell-mell The hell out of any dragon-infested Territory, tail between its legs.

It is good that, being two, We are able to choose what to do.

And yet we are sometimes one. You feel we are, don’t you?

Aren’t you sometimes only a groundhog Or hedgehog doing what naturally You do, unaware how humans Write books called The Tragic View Of Life or read such books rather Than deal with the dragons you see in the meadow As you munch slugs and grubs, unconcerned? And aren’t you glad you are?

Poems by Jonathan Bracker have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Northwest and other periodicals, and in eight collections, the latest of which, from Seven Kitchens Press, is Attending Junior High. He lives in San Francisco and is the editor of Bright Cages: Selected Poems of Christopher Morley (University of Pennsylvania Press: 1965; reissued 2018); co-author with Mark I. Wallach of Christopher Morley (Twayne: 1976); and editor of A Little Patch of Shepherd’s Thyme: Prose Passages Of Thomas Hardy Arranged As Verse (Moving Finger Press: 2013).