AT THE END OF THE PANDEMIC

At the end of summer, the grass bends 

and leans towards its own sorrow, 

a tawny mantle draped across the hills, 

like a fine shawl for the coming winter. 

It waves and ripples in the wind, a girl 

letting down her long braids. Time and distance 

crenelated with longing and endless desire.

Sorrow is plaited and woven into the dregs 

of grief and forgetfulness. But summer 

is getting longer. The earth's thirst. We are left 

with unquenched distances opening into a void, 

where the small ghosts of our hands 

push back the future, keeping it at bay, 

dressed in the castoffs of desire and longing 

for a time that may never come. We tailor

time to fit into the crammed closets of the past, 

to find a home among the orphaned shoes 

and detritus we defend and hold onto. 

And yet in the dark, we want to own that bright eye 

of the sun lingering on the cusp of the horizon, 

until the pangs of an unimaginable future become

an iron fist squeezing the ventricles of the heart.

2/1/23 Imbolc, Write On! with Terri Glass