Summer (’16)
1
The cyclamens have a hard time
breathing in July.
The sun ravages them and earth
is too dry.
Still, try remembering March light
and the tight
deep-buried bulbs that somehow
do not die.
2
The children are scattered
like weeds.
The children are scattered dust-colored
dirt-covered
like weeds. Mid-summer grey reigns,
and rain
exists not even in memory, here where children
dressed all
in debris peer out from under slabs of
jagged stones,
bombed homes, mountains or ruined
thrones
they may have climbed, small kings and
queens
of imagined realms, smoothest pebbles
in small palms their
caressed totems and favorite songs as they
would have climbed
here where now they half-buried lie, small bodies
crushed by pitched-black
weight, there they wait, to be pulled out from
under the remains
of broken town, mangled concrete, piled-up stones,
bones, dust clouds and
shrouds, on the children who are
scattered now
across the whole countryside
like weeds.
3
At the edge of another summer.
At the edge of a fallow field.
At the edge of day.
Waiting
For last light of dusk
To call all the children
Home.
Copyright Credit: Rachel Tziva Back, "Summer '16" from What Use is Poetry, the Poet is Asking. Copyright © 2019 by Rachel Tziva Back. Reprinted by permission of Rachel Tziva Back.