Here's a woman's black glove.
It ought to mean something. 
A thoughtful stranger left it
On the red mailbox at the corner. 

Three days the sky was troubled, 
Then today a few snowflakes fell
On the glove, which someone,
In the meantime, had turned over,
So that its fingers could close

A little. . . Not yet a fist.
So I waited, with the night coming.
Something told me not to move. 
Here where flames rise from trash barrels, 
And the homeless sleep standing up. 


Charles Simic, a Serbian-American poet and former Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, has died at the age of 84. He is the author of many books of poetry and criticism, including Selected Poems, 1963-1983, Unending Blues—both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize—The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems, which won a Pulitzer in 1990; Walking the Black Cat, a National Book Award finalist in 1996; and recent collections like Come Closer and Listen in 2019 and No Land in Sight earlier this year.