World View

I’m going to write a poem to remind me why I love this world...

World View

I’m going to write a poem today to remind me why
I love this world. I’m going to fill it with birds that wing and kids

who sing so purely from within their soul-selves that tears blossom.
I’m going to paint literary pictures of camping trips

and waterfalls I visited as a child and season it with the warming
reassurance of my father’s hand holding mine as the water roared

like nothing else I’d ever heard before or ever since.
I will celebrate the joys and fears I found in fathering

my own laughing son: the way his hand feels in mine as we watch
the ocean sing to the moon at night. I will fill the wooden

heart of the page so it overflows with quiet kindnesses
that subtly rewrite the history of the world. Future

tyrants will topple in their teenage years. Their rage allayed
by the grace of a friend who listened with love and compassion

to the injustice they suffered. In the cracks between each line
I’ll sow some downy moss-green early-morning light to sprout up

in the lay of night as birds begin their daily hymn of joy,
and I will write about the feathery way you drift from sleep

and wake to gaze out at the world, as the world wakes
and coolly gazes back in upon the flowering forever of us all.

Photo by Matt Layne

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Matt Layne writes…

When I was a night baker, I especially loved the feeling of those pre-dawn hours as morning crept close and most of the city still slept; the birds stirred, and rays of sunlight gold-lit the trees across from my little baker's room. There was something intangibly delicious about a world still asleep, and years later, I still love to wake early and watch the world come alive with birds and light. I lie in my bed and listen and watch and remember and think how darkness gives way to the dawn, and this complicated old world and all its complicated old people are capable of momentary lapses of wonder and beauty. May the wooden heart of your pages overflow with quiet kindnesses.

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“World View” appears in Miracle Strip, released August 31, 2022.

Miracle Strip, a poetry collection by Matt Layne, is a unique hybrid of the written and spoken word. Each piece of the collection has an end-stop embellishment QR code which, when scanned, transforms the reader into a listener. Layne has recorded each poem, often with the accompaniment of musician and poet, Ned Mudd. The first line of the book invites the reader to “tell me your story, and I will tell you mine,” in the campfire tradition. In Miracle Strip, the reader and poet embark on an experiential journey of memories and the ghosts who haunt us.

Miracle Strip by Matt Layne is in print! Get your copy today!

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Poet, librarian, raconteur; Matt Layne has been poking hornet's nests and looking under rocks for lizards and snakes since he was knee-high to a peanut peg. His debut multimedia poetry collection, Miracle Strip, had been awarded the 2025 Alabama Author Award for Poetry and was named the 2024 Book of the Year by the Alabama State Poetry Society. Order your copy today.

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