Fingernail Moon: A Coalcracker looks for Glassboro - Paperback

by Ben Jezierski (Author)

This is how
we come to know
one another:

statue by statue;
leaf by leaf;
fragments of ourselves,
gathered and assembled
into quiet initiations
of discovery.

Many years ago, I traded the culm banks and Company houses of a small Northeastern Pennsylvania borough for the stockade fences and manicured lawns of a suburban vinyl village in Southern New Jersey. As time passed, I came to discover within myself a kind of spiritual homelessness.

These poems are the results of a year spent in quiet, attentive evening walks through the streets of our neighborhood-a reaching out to the Spirit of another place... and a deeply personal encounter with its rhythms, its hesitations, and its unexpected graces. In opening myself to its idiosyncrasies-and offering a few of my own in return-a subtle exchange unfolded: a conversation carried by intuition, silence, and mutual recognition.

What lives in these pages is not a recollection of what was, but a record of what becomes possible when we allow ourselves to welcome-and be welcomed in. Each poem offers a small threshold-an invitation to notice, to soften, to discover the Spirit of a place that has always been there, waiting for us to acknowledge it.

For readers drawn to themes of belonging, displacement, spiritual attentiveness, and the quiet work of learning to live in a different landscape, these poems present a companionable, contemplative path.