Women at Graves
If you want to
learn
how to go on, study
women at graves,
the way they stand,
backs to the wind,
and how acceptance
settles like a fine
mist
in their hair, a
light hand
on their shoulders.
Their eyes hold
what
the rest of us
spend
our brief lives
seeking:
an intimate
knowledge
of earth and sky,
why
they persist,
together
yet apart, how a
tilting
wing slices the air
at the precise
point
of balance between
them,
where the swallow
goes,
what the crow
knows.
The Departed
They gather to
recite
our names, a tribe
of peaceful people
who make their home
along the
riverbank,
subsisting on the
promise
of fish, on the
quiet
of late afternoons,
when
long blue shadows
move
across the endless
grass.
They wait for us to
tire
of our busyness, to
grow
weary in our bones.
They're filled with
longing
for us to give in,
join them,
but patient as
stones.
CP
Antonia Clark's poems have appeared in Anderbo,
Apparatus, The Cortland Review, Rattle, Softblow, and other fine places.
Her work won an Editor's Favorite Award at Camroc
Press Review in 2012. She loves French picnics and plays French café music
on a sparkly purple accordion.
