These Are the Days

A poem

 

that step out onto the lawn after supper

and look up through the linden tree

still dense with waxy leaves. When summer sticks

like resin to the boy’s skin though schoolbags

again litter the hall. The breezy, open-window days

just before cancer. Days when the teenage daughter

forgets to smoulder with some primal anger

and the fridge, fixed, hums yummily in the corner

keeping the celery crisp, the milk very cold.

Weekdays of mashed potatoes, frozen peas

and grocery-store roast chicken. Easy days,

though we strive and strive, going on about

anniversary trips and where did the romance go.

Such dear days, like lunching grandmothers. Or even

sweeter, harder. Lined up in all their stunning

uneventfulness, jams sparkling in the larder.