Unhappy shepherdess,
Numbed feet and hands and the face
Turbid with fever
You love, and that is no unhappy fate
Not one person but all, does it warm your winter?
Walking with numbed and cut feet
Along the last ridge of migration
On the last coast above the not-to-be-colonized
Ocean, across the streams of the people
Drawing a faint pilgrimage
As if you were drawing a line at the end of the world
Under the columns of ancestral figures:
So many generations in Asia
So many in Europe, so many in America:
To sum the whole. Poor Clare Walker, she already
Imagines what sum she will cast in April.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on October 18, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
