Hadley Hury’s most recent poem to appear here was “Screens” (August 2016) 

Return Trip
By Hadley Hury

When you spoke in your sleep
I looked over your shoulder
and the red digits showed 1:30 a.m.

“Here,” you had said—softly but quite distinctly,
as though in conversation, and evidently driving—
“This is the road to my grandparents’ house…There they are!”

Now, hours later over coffee
in the gentle light of the porch,
you say you have no recollection

of this encounter with these people you last saw
alive and together nearly forty years ago—
but I’m happy you had me along, this once, to meet them.

Perhaps it is early morning, and perhaps
they too are seated on a screened porch—waiting for us—
crosswords in their laps.

Good country people, they probably are not enjoying
the scent of cinnamon in their coffee,
but for all we know it may be precisely

this moment of early September when the sun
inches over the next branch south in the buckeye tree
and the world is fresh.