I have all of these
lily plants but not you,
nor peace.
How they ease
my breathing yet
trouble my mind,
symbols
of your soaring
too high to see
or reach,
beauty clanging
like bells
out of tune, time’s
up. Leaves
so shiny & perfect
they look fake,
but a few brown ones
barely clinging &
curled in on themselves—
less supple, less everything
like me, let me know
they are real.
They are real. Too
real. Lord knows
you were the most real
one can ever be & now
you are really gone!
Your need is over,
but your giving goes on
& on. Heaven is shedding
desire’s heavy robes, pure
devotion to love’s
bare essence. You, flowered
& shiny in what’s left
of my heart, teaching me
to rally. No matter
how it may appear,
I’m not rootless.
Today & tomorrow
& the day after that,
you remain evergreen
& ours
somewhere not here,
as my tears land
in potted soil exiled
from its mother, Earth,
like me.
Copyright © 2021 by Kamilah Aisha Moon. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 2, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
in loving memory of Concepcion Cruz Agullana
Everywhere is a cemetery,
and there will be no funeral. on either side of the Pacific Ocean.
No one will give last rites to my lola, No guessing nurse will call my name or hers
I will have heard no doctor’s steely voice There’ll be no waiting room
to call her ‘the body.’ Over the body. There will be no priest
swinging a pendulum of incense no prayers no rosaries there’s no money
No undertaker will proclaim her life There’ll be no glass plate covering
her wooden casket. There will be no casket it’s too expensive There will be no party
no lumpia no noodles for no life long enough
No black attire No hands clasping tissue or other hands
‘The body’ will not be seen There will be my grandma in an urn–a tiny basket
her curled body that lilted into the afterlife after dementia twenty years after grandpa
there’s no room for every body
there’s no house for everybody to come in and stay no room for sorrows There will be no placeholder no
land no candles no water no six-foot empty she will be unmarked
my lola, an unnamed earthquake
No one will hear her long name how it stretches a sunset if my lola dies and no one sees is
she still my lola? is a canyon a series of cliffs? there’s no place in the apartment for what rituals
maybe they will send her to the Philippines my grandma is a maybe and we are not they
did you know when airlines carry the deceased
they are called passengers
they travel in their coffins passengers in seats are called existing passengers
this small poem the only eulogy where we’ll put my grandma her existence laid to rest in a
poem
in this non-ilokano language a killer rows and rows of dirt
money doesn’t grow maybe someone there will bury her
how will i carry her when only darkness has the space?
where will we put my grandma when we can’t afford our grief?
Copyright © Janice Sapigao. This poem originally appeared in Drunk in a Midnight Choir. Used with permission of the author.
for the students
The great dead circled the serrated
hills; they tried to remind you
to breathe. An old rat crawled
under fire-forgotten rocks; it was called
& pulled to a movable nothing
far from the human need to
heed & heal. Maybe you can’t
find it now, but the season
hauls the wind inside & because
you’re a student, you can put
some questions in your phone, especially
when you feel you shouldn’t cry …
Stipple the worry, the grief-torn, those
patterns of should & won’t ::; new
minutes set in past danger— spikelet
or callus on the roadside; you
stop in awe & are home.
Your human burden varies; the once
boundless freedom you sought even in
private still pulses on your skin ...
The little thistles between the human
& non-human animals, the linked auras
in trees & a colorful radiance
of bodies are hunched to begin—
Copyright © Brenda Hillman. This poem originally appeared in Clade Song. Used with permission of the author.
Bird dogs, they say—
the kind that chase something in flight.
try to capture with its teeth
a winged ceremony,
feathers dripping from each of their mouths.
The first dog was just plain old.
The second died of a heart worm pill —my father neglected to purchase.
What else has he let die?
My mother fixed his plate every night,
never bought a car, or shoes, or skirt
without his permission.
She birthed children and raised them.
She, my sister, and I—
winged things in the air.
I knew there was blood under the ground.
No surprise when I found the house was sinking.
Our dogs always stayed outside, not allowed
in the living room.
Only the basement,
where my father stayed, slept, fixed things.
My mother, a silent companion.
The dog barks and my father goes running.
The dog dies
and we bury my mother.
Graves for everyone
We bark
and feathers fall from my father’s teeth.
He barks and becomes the tree.
The bark remembers phantom noose
and screams.
The screech becomes a bullet
without a window to land through,
just a body,
a backyard,
a shovel.
Copyright © 2020 by Barbara Fant. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 29, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.