Born in 1952, Alberto Ríos is the inaugural state poet laureate of Arizona and the author of many poetry collections, including A Small Story about the Sky (Copper Canyon Press, 2015). In 1981, he received the Walt Whitman Award for his collection Whispering to Fool the Wind (Sheep Meadow Press, 1982). He served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2014 to 2020. This is the kind of poem that needs to be read aloud, and more than once. The repetition of ‘give’ and the opposing concepts of someone/nobody, has changed/could have changed, better/wounded, are held together with that one word. As the poet says, Giving has many faces – I imagine in your own life experience, there have been many faces you can recognize. The giving and the receiving, the two sides of the same coin. Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand, / Mine to yours, yours to mine. This seems to me to be a critical line. It is something we share at a personal level, hand to hand, no matter how globally it reaches. And don’t you love the simple green that comes from your blue and my yellow? What you did not have and what I had to give – these come together to make Something greater from the difference.