Poetry of Issue #8        Page 56

Poem Beginning with a Sunday in Fall

The games and dinners begin
  with words in agony.
I am no syllable
  on the dog’s walk
along a thin park trail,
  ahead a boy and mother
clear as branches
  when leaves give to wind,
paper cradles
  to infant ground.
The boy bears left
  five years too big
for training wheels,
  he hums a tune that swerves
with every pedal thrust.
We are unsounded
  warning. In his humming
I hear my son, see
  the smallness of a bed
where we lay to stop
  his tears, for a blood mother gone
the way of summer shade.
  They speak like the girl
without words. A woman after all,
  her wheelchair at the curb.
And the old man
  with grown son
he leads to the drug store,
  who won’t outlive that need.
Many times I thought
  to look their way,
close my eyes and beam
  a will to bud the twigs
and make the opposite of rain,
  as the boy rides on with face
upturned to the falling suicides.
  He waves the latest down,
which flutter as on he goes,
  and like the language of all grief
will never land.