Grace Cavalieri has won the Allen Ginsberg Award for poetry, the Pen-Syndicated Fiction Award for short story, the Bordighera Poetry Award, and a Paterson Prize for Poetry. She holds the Silver Medal from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Awards are also from The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Commission on Working Women, and The American Association of University Women. She has enjoyed several state arts and humanities council awards and fellowships. She received the inaugural Columbia Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library Poetry Committee for “significant contribution to poetry.”  Read more at her web site www.gracecavalieri.com.  Photo by Claire Heath.
 

A button falls off

            Hold the pearl between your fingers

Then sew it on

            The web of time expands

Wipe away the last crumb on the counter

            With a flat hand

Among the yellow flowers is survival on a stalk

            Is a wish on the Winter moon

More to come in the morning

            Someone is playing the piano upstairs

The wisdom of certainty without pain

             Warm in February.