Deathday / Snowday
One way to mark a loss is
to bury it. Squirrels mourn the departing light
by turning their futures into acorns underground.
I often wonder if warblers mourn the seasons
they never get to see in the woods they’re born
and fledge in, their tiny bodies always winging away on travelling
winds to elsewhere. Isn’t flight after all just the muscle
of change moving through air? Eleven years ago
today, your brother died. One way to mark a loss
is to sing it. Some spring twilights are made for mourning
doves. Mud-scented and newly green. When they coo into
that tonguing dark, the sweetness of it cracks me. I often wonder
if squirrels remember the shine of summer while cracking open
winter acorns. Isn’t burial after all just the well
into which we pour everything our hearts cannot contain?
It’s the fourth day of April and snowing on the daffodils already
blooming in my garden. One way to mark a loss is to
tend it. The spring your brother died, we planted kale
in your backyard. I’d spent the week before shoveling compost
onto fresh-tilled beds—billions of lost bodies flaking
like stars across the earth. My hands kept slipping off the shovel,
or maybe off the sky. I often wonder if the twilight perfumes
itself with all those falling blossoms to call each dove closer
to its softness. Isn’t song after all just the name we give
the seeds we plant? In the wormy dark beneath the snow,
a beloved is taking flight.
Laura Sackton is a queer writer based in rural Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in West Branch and Tampa Review. She’s known around the internet as an evangelist for earnestness.
Header photo by Aritha, courtesy Pixabay.
