Steve Schild is an award-winning poet based in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. His most recent collection is Invocation, a self-published chapbook (2025) of 30 poems. Here is an excerpt therefrom:
invocation
If we would take the knives that every day cut us
And turn them into sculptors’ tools or healers’ hands
Rather than excuses or weapons or reasons to give up
On ourselves and everything else,
Then maybe we, too, would find ourselves
smiling wide-eyed as he did in the gallery,
taking it all in and talking to strangers,
and then, just like this motherless boy,
we, too, could shine brown-eyed handsome,
rhapsodic about spring sliding like
velvet into summer …
I Barely Knew Him (for D.H.)