Ronda Piszk Broatch, 13 December 2017
Photograph
In the book of sleep, I find your radiance.
Meanwhile the wild wind flexes the windows
above the high-tide mark. Enabled
is my imagining, shape of a death song,
lines the crow describes between cemetery
trees. Grave I was not, invoking the white
owl to this small country pitched with stones
in the overgrown depressions of earth.
In some countries, mourners plant marigold,
poppy, pansy and periwinkle, bright
coverlet for those asleep. From my mouth
flies the owl with her secret intact. I now return
my mother to the blue shadow of my father,
Bidding them fly into that scalding, aortal light.