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Souvenirs


10.25.14 Posted in today's words by

Joan L Cannon’s most recent poem to appear here was Road Kill (November 2013). Her new book of poetry, My Mind Is Made of Crumbs, is available from Anaphora Literary Press.

Souvenirs
By Joan L Cannon

Aslant on asphalt
seeming to beg for notice
lies a grey-ribbed
reject from a crow.
I stoop to take it carefully.
Two steps more, and there
lies another, but shorter.
The pair of quills now
side by side across my palm,
when, behold, a third
in the crushed grass
beside the road.

All three I place
on the windowsill.
They hold the gloss
of anthracite–so much
blacker than the pavement
that relinquished them.

That was August;
now in January
in their small pitcher
I notice they are no longer blacker
than the tar from which I
picked them like exotic blossoms.
Not themselves alive,
they mirror now how time is wearing
their wearers as us.

 



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