Close to Home

I am not a reader of poetry, and I don't understand it well. But "Close to Home" drew me in, perhaps because I recognized the sound and understood the ambience. For whatever reason, it reverberated in me; I understood not only the ambience but the feeling. Thank you.

I love Dan Gerber's work--honest and caring, with no attempt to complicate universal human emotions beyond understanding. His wisdom and compassion are apparently limitless. Thanks, Mr. Gerber.

". . . but not that one." This is exactly right.

What a gem! The perfect ending filled to the brim with implications! Masterful.

Beautiful stuff here. It's clear that Dan's poem is full of his tenderness and his anxiety.

A lovely poem. There is something about a wounded animal that captures the heart. One winter, after a blizzard, I saw a deer with only three legs in my backyard, struggling through the heavy snow. Naïvely, I called animal control to see if something could be done. "We can put it down," the man told me, meaning they would shoot the deer in the head. I declined. The deer vanished for a few months, but reappeared in the spring. A happy survivor.

In reference to the line "but not that one," why not that one? Another one, the healthy sibling one? What about the survival of the fittest?