It's getting toward my time
to be enrolled among the legions
of the fallen pretty-good poets.
A grateful earth has patted their heads.
And here's my head,
this failing crop of white hairs
mown to stubble;
these dry discolored lumps
half-hidden in it, recalling all those
makeshift graves in the bullet-mown
Cornfield at Antietam.
---And then came hundreds of mourning doves,
to peck at the shattered kernels; to peck
down into one bloated shape
the gravediggers missed---
their beaks were foul as vultures'
there. In that obscene place
they were too late to symbolize
peace, let alone mourn.
Those were old lies about them.
But they themselves were just an old true
story of doves flying
toward their food, in the blue air,
their slender tails pointing always
backward toward
the warm original egg.
I lived in an egg once.
I loved the soft light permeating
my shell and my sealed eyelids.
I felt the warmth of my mother's feathers.
Or was it just the sun's?
Soon I'll burn in the sun's
molten yolk, and feel nothing.
The earth will circle endlessly.
I'll paint my side of it blue,
and space will blacken the other.
(Ploughshares, Vol 48, No.4, 2023)