When you hear that voice saying, 
I’m nobody
and 
my life is boring,
your mind has become 
a newspaper, 
reporting on your life 
as if it were 
where you would find 
celebrities and calamities, 
awards and booms.

You have believed 
the reporters in your head, 
the editors and executives,
that you are measured by 
how loud and unusual you are.

You who washes the clothes, 
feeds the children,
shovels the snow, 
think you don’t matter, 
as you scrape drifts of snow off the car 
as deep as a New York cheesecake,
and wonder when you’ll get 
to your next appointment. 

Snowflakes fall as you
you heave them up and throw them away, 
thinking you live in a world 
robbed of mystery.

They keep coming, like unopened letters, 
not one like another.
So many that they make
the cypresses bow, 
the streets hush,
the fields round.

You will not understand them
by reading the paper, 
and that is why you must
close it up, 
and look out.
Greet each six-pointed star 
like a messenger, 
a memory, 
a face you know.