Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

^{—after Gwendolyn Brooks}

My wild grief didn’t know where to end.
Everywhere I looked: a field alive and unburied. 
Whole swaths of green swallowed the light. 
All around me, the field was growing. I grew out 
My hair in every direction. Let the sun freckle my face. 
Even in the greenest depths, I crouched 
Towards the light. That summer, everything grew 
So alive and so alone. A world hushed in green. 
Wildest grief grew inside out.

I crawled to the field’s edge, bruises blooming 
In every crevice of my palms. 
I didn’t know I’d reached a shoreline till I felt it 
There: A salt wind lifted 
The hair from my neck. 
At the edge of every green lies an ocean. 
When I saw that blue, I knew then: 
This world will end.

Grief is not the only geography I know. 
Every wound closes. Repair comes with sweetness, 
Come spring. Every empire will fall: 
I must believe this. I felt it 
Somewhere in the field: my ancestors 
Murmuring Go home, go home—soon, soon. 
No country wants me back anymore and I’m okay.

If grief is love with nowhere to go, then 
Oh, I’ve loved so immensely. 
That summer, everything I touched 
Was green. All bruises will fade 
From green and blue to skin. 
Let me grow through this green 
And not drown in it. 
Let me be lawless and beloved, 
Ungovernable and unafraid. 
Let me be brave enough to live here. 
Let me be precise in my actions. 
Let me feel hurt. 
I know I can heal. 
Let me try again—again and again.

Lovers, forget your love,
     And list to the love of these,
She a window flower,
     And he a winter breeze.

When the frosty window veil
     Was melted down at noon,
And the cagèd yellow bird
     Hung over her in tune,

He marked her through the pane,
     He could not help but mark,
And only passed her by,
     To come again at dark.

He was a winter wind,
     Concerned with ice and snow,
Dead weeds and unmated birds,
     And little of love could know.

But he sighed upon the sill,
     He gave the sash a shake,
As witness all within
     Who lay that night awake.

Perchance he half prevailed
     To win her for the flight
From the firelit looking-glass
     And warm stove-window light.

But the flower leaned aside
     And thought of naught to say,
And morning found the breeze
     A hundred miles away.

^{—after William Wordsworth}

The world is too much with us. Late and soon
it’s morning, phone in hand, and a screen on my wrist powers
on to report the no rest I had. News, a tragedy—so easily ours—
already breaking as I crack my eggs. Rage and prayers, rage and prayers, a boon
for the tycoon’s fear-campaign, clicks for the zillionaire buying up the moon.
Ad, ad, an AI figment, someone squawking, someone hawking—hours
consumed, of this only life, and who is left in the garden, who is tending the flowers?
I am trying to hear the birdsong through the auto-tune
of all this ubiquitous engineered crooning, but a podcast informs me silence will be
extinct by the weekend, gone like thought and the good kind of alone. Peace is outworn;
it’s chaos that feeds the algorithm, no likes for the actual, the tangible. No lea
without a billboard promising Hell as if it isn’t here. But don’t be forlorn, 
I’m sold—the world is yours! (after this ad) unending and enhanced on a screen. Don’t mind the sea
at the door. Time for a selfie, suggests my phone. A filter. I can add (for free!) horns.

And isn’t everything risk?

The beloved lives 
Then dies,
Then (if we’re lucky) 
Rises again 
Into a poem or song

Or into the world 
In some other form 
Impossible to predict.

Simplest story, oldest tale: 

Sparrows sing it
From every hedge;

And swallows, also, 
From their nests on the ledge. 

In losing you I lost my sun and moon
And all the stars that blessed my lonely night.
I lost the hope of Spring, the joy of June,
The Autumn’s peace, the Winter’s firelight.
I lost the zest of living, the sweet sense
Expectant of your step, your smile, your kiss;
I lost all hope and fear and keen suspense
For this cold calm, sans agony, sans bliss.
I lost the rainbow’s gold, the silver key
That gave me freedom of my town of dreams;
I lost the path that leads to Faërie
By beechen glades and heron-haunted streams.
I lost the master word, dear love, the clue
That threads the maze of life when I lost you. 

^{If I die, I want a loud death. I don’t want to be just 
breaking news, or a number in a group, I want a death
that the world will hear, an impact that will remain
through time, and a timeless image that cannot be
buried by time or place. 
         —Fatima Hassouna, Gaza photo journalist,
         on April 15, before her death on April 16, 2025}

Like the sound waves in space that tear 
the remnants of supernovas, and twist the paths
of light
           so maybe this is why some spiral galaxies 
like Messier 77 resemble ears. 
                                                   But also when  
sunset splinters its light over the ridgeline and 
the fireflies in this ravine cry desperately to save it,
  
or when the embers from last night’s crackling 
campfire tremble, 
     or when our dog begins to fear
the sounds we do not hear,
        then we know those waves
have touched us too.
                         For it is the silence after 
the plane’s screech or the missile’s strike,
a kind of voiceless scream
                                           that her photos captured
even as she stood among the rubble looking up
as if those waves could also signal a moment’s
desperate hope.
                        There is so much we do not hear—
the rumble of shifting sand dunes, the purr and drum 
of the wolf spider, the echoes of bats, the explosions 
on the sun, the warning cry of the treehopper, but

it’s the cry of those buried alive we so often refuse
to hear as too distant or beyond our reach to help,

yet even an elephant’s infrasound, which can be 
detected by herd members as far as 115 miles
brings them to safety,
which tells us, well, 
tells us what?
                             It was Jesus (Luke 19:40)
who said if these keep silent, then the very stones
will cry out.
                      Here, the news moves on to the next
loudest story,
                      or some chat on the phone blares
the latest scandal, score or personal interest.
In Gaza, 
one journalist warned, a press vest makes you a target.

In one photo a hand reaches through the rubble is if 
it were reaching to speak, 16 April 2025, from Al-Touffah.

In the end, it was the sound of her home collapsing.

In the end, we are all targets in our silences.

In the end, we know her absence the way each syllable 
shouts its lament, pleading from inside each of these words.

^{i.m. Sam Fox, 1941–2020}

In a charmed summer garden
among the fruit trees where
we walked along the wall
we barely noticed it.

At one point when you leaned
against it, it gave way.
There was a sudden breeze.
You were no longer there.

Bird cries did not abate
and the stream went on flowing.
Small creatures scurried. How can
a man evaporate?

Time turns a corner and
the world is as it was
yesterday afternoon
but for that sleight-of-hand.

I’m wise and damaged now.
Give me some time to rest.
All the bright illusions
I loved are giving way.

As the day turned to dusk, we sensed we could feel
the people we’d loved and lost calling
like a breeze that suggests itself but never
actually awakens the trees. She told me
again about the moment she decided to let
our first child go so she could go on
living herself, and I remembered
how once, as a young man, I’d walked by myself
for a day, until I was lost and came
to a boulder and a creek. She remembered yearning
to comfort our baby after we’d scattered
her ashes, and I remembered that the sun
had been warm; the sound of the creek had filled me
with something as different from thought or song
as a dream. She said she still dreamed of Audrey,
our lost child. And then I told her again
that when dusk fell, a clutch of black birds landed.
Even when I stood up and gestured, there
in that unfamiliar landscape, they refused to fly away.
I think they were hungry. But I had nowhere else to go,
so I lay down under stars so sharp
in that darkness they hurt my eyes, even
when my eyes were closed. All night those black birds
stood watching, waiting for something. Like angels,
she said then and laughed, though I don’t think she was joking.

^{i.m. Paula Merwin}

All this time, I felt like I had to describe 
the things I did, and what was done to me,
how I had to wander a strange world for years, 
needing to be busy, sleeping in strange beds, 
searching through cities for chapels to weep in, 
learning the stitches that keep a ripped heart 
together for a while, when what I really need 
to say is that it rained all night and morning, 
and the drops were a percussion on the trees,
and after the sun rose, I saw an insect land on the railing 
and take shelter, and a bird drank from a leaf. 
Wild pigs exploded from the bushes where they’d hid,
and the sage in the bowl smelt of memory and musk.
A toad sat—still as any god—on the wet stone.