Mourning Doves Make the Best Music

by Karen Friedland


Can I tell you how happy I an
with this humble little life?

With the paths I walk every day
with my dogs,
and the trees I know like lovers,
that bend in the wind.

Having finally learned
to fight nothing—

to let the whole world wash right through me,
and simply be suspended
in the still blue sky
of an ordinary day.


* * * * *

A nonprofit grant writer by day, Karen’s poems have been published in Nixes Mate Review, Writing in a Women’s Voice, the Lily Poetry Review, Vox Populi and others. Her book of poems, Places That Are Gone, was published in 2019 by Nixes Mate Books, and she has a chapbook forthcoming in late 2020 from Červená Barva Press. She lives in Boston with her husband, two cats and two dogs.