Brook
Almost four years after
your death, I ease
into a lawn chair
I’ve unfolded in the grass
next to your headstone.
The kids, memories
of you mostly faded
now, drift off across
the sloped hill, chasing
our dog, unleashed
and running free.
When they return,
we search the brook
at the cemetery’s edge
for crayfish.
The current slides
over our bare feet
as we lift stones,
careful not to cloud
the water. I bend low,
cup my hands,
show the kids how
to move slowly,
just the way
we did as boys.
When it’s time
to leave, I linger
by a new headstone,
the grass around it
not strong enough yet
to be mowed, but
the kids are running
ahead, and the dog is
pulling at its leash,
leading me forward.
.
Rob Cording lives in Boston with his wife and two children. He teaches high school English at the John D. O’Bryant School and has published previously in the American Journal of Poetry, the New Ohio Review, and the Hawai’i Pacific Review.
Stone Poetry Quarterly 