Sunday, August 25, 2024

Campaign season: Elegy 19


Campaign season

I read your

Mother poems over

And over again

Knowing the entanglements

Of grief: you

My parents Marie

Not cardboard stand-ins

But actual absences

Opening the computer

This morning I

Saw your photographs

Smiling at me

Grown more thin

Susceptible to bronchitis

Toll of peripatetic

Travels in planes

Thinking to separate

Yourself from colleague

From niece from

Intimate opportunists one

Of whom—it seems--

Would kill you

So open so

Inclined to serve

You exited that

Door / opened another

Entered the staging

Of your death

Keep your naivete

A friend advised

When I got

Burned but was

It worth it

To stay in

Such unguarded space

Your intrepid self

Rowing past lens’s

Reach / I want

To talk to

You now about

The politics of joy!

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