As the future ripens in the past...
a terrible festival of dead leaves
—Anna Akhmatova
The trees talk quietly among themselves
the thrush sings its brown song brushed with blue
the roses from the bodega open in the vase
and under the streetlight the long shadows
tarnishing the day as we know it—if
I ask for a stone you give me a stone,
if I ask for water I do not get water,
everything I love weighted and found
wanting, as if the world knew how to give
answers to questions. In the long generous
shadow of history, I wake and wonder
how long it can go on, my lips touching
your ear, asking, what are you thinking—
while in the capital the lion stalks his cage
and on the veld the scorched banyans bend
under their fruit, the camps charred, no one
to pick it. A long time ago, after months
when death came so quickly to us it was
as if we had written an invitation, crows
settled in the ghost trees. There is my
mother, you said, and my father. It goes on.
Copyright © 2017 by Cynthia Zarin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 2, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.