Fifteen years and even I
who watched every season
of its changing can no longer
remember the field
that’s grown over.
Sheltered by snow-toppled
grasses, the green shoots
of trees hardened,
and by the first June
red cedars tongued
the air above bluestem.
Nothing lasts. Not the field,
not my girlhood, not the baby
I carried until the next came
behind him. Now my daughter
is the one who is young,
and already too heavy
to carry. Doves croon
to her from new pines
as they did from the pines
of my childhood. The sorrow
in their song is the sorrow
of the human listener,
old sorrow that somehow
I knew even then.
by Tim Neil
poetry
... If you look to it for sympathy, it / looks back. / If you ask about grief, all it will / tell you is that grief is a grey gutter ...
by Esther Ra
poetry
... Draughts of moist air move through Seoul, / and the whales shadow rooftops, moaning. / Couples slouch deeply in plastic blue chairs, ...