Ecclesiastes 3
Let’s talk about a morning with no horizon,
where the leaves sweep from barely visible trees,
where crows scavenge unknowable carrion
in astonishing numbers. Let us go pick
the last of the blackberries and see the Autumn
brown deer who’ve trampled the new-planted rye,
emerge from the mist. Let us lick the blood
from our thorn-ripped skin,
fill our bowl with the very last fruit which won’t know
the hard freeze. Let us eat and eat and eat
of this quiet day whispering all of this: the nearly bare
limbs, the not yet rotting leaves, the thinning herd.
And what of the unripe left on the vining canes,
the five deer that will become four then three
then two before spring, and me, who will leave
one of a diminishing number of winters behind,
a whole season of last kisses, a hundred hundred
hundred fewer breaths and then comes the green
and mottled fawns and us, again, planting trees.
.
Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio. He is a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist and Best of the Net nominee. His poems have appeared or upcoming in Whale Road Review, Rattle, OneArt, Banyan Review, Minyan, and Cutthroat. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by SheilaNaGig.
Stone Poetry Quarterly 