Do you still remember the time
you spent with us?
Giddy, amazed
on the brink of girlhood,
laughter brimmed your eyes
with shy, green promise.

In sweet May,
you drifted through the mornings
at your work. The hushed rooms
and neighborhood streets
quivered with your songs,
one after another, their lilt
a slackened line cast toward your future.

I’d lift my nose
from the mess of books and pages
that burnt out the best part of me
when I was young,
and listen, up here on my balcony,
for your voice and that sure hand
clicking at the loom.
I stared at the blue blue sky,
the sun-glazed streets, the little gardens,
the sea so far beyond these mountains.
Words, too much merely ours,
can’t tell what I felt.

All the nice things:
dreams, hope, a heart renewed . . .
Dear girl, life and fate
seemed so good then.
Now memory of that imagination
tastes bitter and makes me see again
how so much went wrong.
Nature hammers us, her children,
with sober promises
unmade or betrayed.

Before winter sucked life
from grass already sick, half-gone
with blight we could not even see,
you, keen child, were lost. The years
never greened long and lush in you.
You never got to wince and blush
at praise for your thick dark hair,
or learn to look at boys
by looking down, away, or trade whispers
with girlfriends coming home from church.

I’m one of the lost, too.
I was the child who died
to myself. It never belonged to me.
The best hope I might have lived into
is gone now. Is this
that world? The same pleasures,
love, work, troubles
we talked about together?
Is this what we are all meant for?
A suffering thing . . . when the fact
showed itself, you disappeared,
whispering about the stone and covered ditch
from your grand distance.