by M F Drummy
One afternoon,
when I am gone,
and you are widowed for a second time,
a cat I will have never known
will climb onto a windowsill
in a house I never lived in
to sit in the sun.
On that day,
you will rise from a kitchen table I never saw
to open the back door
onto a desert garden I never stood in.
In your hands,
you’ll hold all the words I ever spoke to you:
those that hurt, those that comforted,
those that held you aloft when you thought
you would collapse to the ground forever.
On your knees,
with the fingers of one hand,
you’ll scrape away a little soil in
the raised bed and,
with the other,
return to the earth the seeds of our life together.
M F Drummy holds a PhD in historical theology from Fordham University. He is the author of numerous haiku/senryu/haibun, articles, essays, poems, reviews, and a monograph on religion and ecology (Being and Earth). His work has appeared, or will appear, in Allium, Amethyst Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, the engine(idling, FERAL, Frogpond, Main Street Rag, Modern Haiku, Pato, Prune Juice, Scarlet Dragonfly, Street Cake, Viridian Door, and many others. He and his wife of nearly 20 years enjoy splitting their time between the Colorado Rockies and the rest of the planet. He can be found at: X @mdrummy56 Instagram @miguelito.drummalino Website https://bespoke-poet.com
Emerge Literary Journal 