CPR
On his knees in the wet street he pressed
on the chest of a stranger older than his mother.
Gifting again her lungs with his breath, then hands
re-clasped in a kind of prayer-meets-compression.
(What are prayers anyway without repetition?
Or miracles, in this case, without a stranger’s breath?)
I tell you of the moment I watched that woman return
under the lips of a young man she had never seen before
and your chest suddenly expands
as if in one short outward breath he too rescued you
just as you had stopped noticing the birdsong of your life.