humility, to know the truth;
that what we know is small indeed:
that most grow older, all must die,
and everyone can break and bleed

but there are those, whose words i read,
who reach for ways to come to terms,
but gather only insolence,
and daily wash themselves with germs

but always find life reaffirms
the thoughts they gather in their heads.
yet, next to them, in that same crowd,
are others finding humble shreds

of life’s uncertain hues and threads.
i do not hold life’s answers here.
i cannot judge how others go;
for i, too, suffer yet, i fear

from arrogance, or something near.
but somehow, in the soul that seeks
to live in kind humility
i find a poetry that speaks

beyond our moral cracks and leaks:
for ‘faith’ has come to seem to mean
a smugness that just will not see —
but it need not mean that at all,
when it leads to
humility