When I Was Young, I Put Myself in Harm’s Way: Poem by Miriam Sagan

When I Was Young, I Put Myself in Harm’s Way

hoping to get hurt
or at least
fall off the back of a motorcycle
and break my heart

how, now past sixty, I’ll still
go out of my way
and travel some cardinal direction or other
saying, I just want to see
(volcano, glacier, Miami Beach)

before it is too late
for me, or it,
and put myself in the way of beauty
and let her have her way with me.