IZZARD PALMS THE BULLET

A Story That Could Be True


If you were exchanged in the cradle and

your real mother died

without ever telling the story

then no one knows your name,

and somewhere in the world

your father is lost and needs you

but you are far away.


He can never find

how true you are, how ready.

When the great wind comes

and the robberies of the rain

you stand on the corner shivering.

The people who go by–

you wonder at their calm.


They miss the whisper that runs

any day in your mind,

“Who are you really, wanderer?”–

and the answer you have to give

no matter how dark and cold

the world around you is:

“Maybe I’m a king.”


William Stafford
Going Over to Your Place: Poems for Each Other
(Selected by Paul B. Janeczko, Bradbury Press, New York)