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Holding the Dying World

Everything I love is here:
          water, green with algae bloom,

or deoxygenated and gray,
          supporting a flock of mergansers;

stubble in a corn field out the train window;
          cherry trees, too baffled by the February

warmth to break bud, except the one,
          sheltered in a courtyard and innocent,

in its petals, of the future;
          bittersweet, eating its way south

kudzu bounding north, all strangling
          vines and matted landscape;

the hot, empty sky; stars
          which we no longer see; I tell you

of the Milky Way and constellations,
          and you imagine darkness

thick enough to reveal them; bark beetles
          stripping naked the bodies of red pines;

the soil, poisoned, compacted, still trying
          to give; and the people – oh, lord, the people –

how I long to take each one
          in my arms and let them cry

while we watch
          an orange moon.

 

Sonja Johanson has recent work appearing in the Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, and Poet Lore. She divides her time between work in Massachusetts and her home in the mountains of western Maine.

 

Issue 12 >