Must spend more time
Taking stock of prior acts.
Come to grips with misdeeds.
Count them out, one by one,
Until I’ve named the lot.
Haven’t decided, just yet,
How to dispense them.
Where to deposit the mess.
Hope a plan emerges,
So I find normalcy again.
It’s the atonement issue.
That time of year,
When it pays to repent.
Measure each transgression.
Enter the Days of Awe.
Reflect upon weakness.
Open this box of fault.
See what spills out.

Bart Edelman’s poetry collections include Crossing the Hackensack (Prometheus Press), Under Damaris’ Dress (Lightning Publications), The Alphabet of Love (Red Hen Press), The Gentle Man (Red Hen Press), The Last Mojito (Red Hen Press), The Geographer’s Wife (Red Hen Press), Whistling to Trick the Wind (Meadowlark Press), and This Body Is Never at Rest: New and Selected Poems 1993 – 2023 (Meadowlark Press). He has taught at Glendale College, where he edited Eclipse, a literary journal, and, most recently, in the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. His work has been widely anthologized in textbooks published by City Lights Books, Etruscan Press, Fountainhead Press, Harcourt Brace, Longman, McGraw-Hill, Prentice Hall, Simon & Schuster, Thomson/Heinle, the University of Iowa Press, Wadsworth, and others. He lives in Pasadena, California.