Contributor Series 6: A Currency of Words
What Remains
By Rae Spencer
Bone, of course
Or the stone echoes of bone
And children
Always there are children
To symbolize our guilt
For the things we couldn’t change
And hope
Wrung from what we did
Empty spider husks
Wafted into corners
With a clot of hair
And a few crumbs
That might have been food
Or not
And windows
Mostly broken
But some not
With just enough dust
To obscure the details
Of what else might remain
On the other side
An unknown balance of cats
Abandoned
Or maybe never loved at all
Furtive, feral shadows
Fleet with the urge to survive
And everywhere there are words
Scribbled and scrawled in diaries
Painted on underpasses
Stamped into books
Shouted once and left to echo forever
On the wind
Enough words to hold all of us
And still describe what remains
Rae Spencer’s most recent poem to appear at vox poetica was Long Division, part of Contributor Series 5: Dramatis Personae.
Very powerful. I love the last two lines.
A strong poem that will stay in my mind today.
This poem has such great momentum!