About the loss of a child, without mentioning parent, child, or death, (in an 8-4 rhythm) |
Offspring - Ivy Elle Nowosad The day is windless, the sky powdery, blue as held breath. Grasses and browning weeds prickle, feet avoiding barbs. Long shadows of trees slice the clearing, fingers reaching, more alive and vivid than the trees that cast them. My gaze follows their penumbra, toward the lake, refusing the day's mindless brilliance. A shard of sky Is the lake, a view to a viewing, squinting against the small casket's glare. Me, bird-dog still, watching for what? A ripple, bubbles, some sign of life? How can it be, something vast as sky is now a shard, a memory? The reflection on the lake, the sky's vanishing child, like that delicate form on the butcher's board, cut from an animal that once roamed the earth. All of us, animals sparking across the plane, then gone. One day, the lake will be gone too and what will take its place? If the water is the sky's offspring, water its source And its glue, each bears the other, Interwoven. How could the sky continue to be without the lake? Hours dissolving, the lake reflects its former self. Me, the water, all motionless beneath bruised clouds. Dusk, its fleeting allure is clear. The lake and I are almost invisible, starless. Frog song drowns out my chattering teeth, and finally, surrendering to the absence of light, I see beneath the surface, the woman veiled in black. How she resembles me, floating beneath the weight of water. |