“Over, the kite’s flight; and of a sudden
is the realization of the morning overcome
by the echo of dark nights, silent witness
to the colorlessness crouching down before us.
Stealing time is what’s been happening all the time.
Is it because you’ve heard only your own cries,
fifty years earlier, too, as they went by, adulterated with death?
Or some shy, crumpled laughter carrying with it
the air of an unspoken but certain defeat?
Somewhere in my mind, I lose the ability
to disappear, as the morning air moves listlessly about,
indifferent to looks, or history, or roots. And here
if I died, like this, dying for the person I was,
or for the one I see coming in and out of your death,
would that be a way out to save me
from the solitude I’ve believed in and pursued
in the same way I pursue the rush of blood in my veins?
There is so much we’ve begun to pile upon you, more
than all the lives we’ve had and have lost. Nothing whatever
burns to ash. Years pass. Days, wisdom, the simple sadness.
A slow-moving ray of sunlight walks me backward
to a past turned magical by the virtue of its emptiness,
this part of myself that never fails to embrace us.”
Daily Dose of Poetry 