The house is gone.
My mother is gone.
The town changes every time
I come back.
But as towns go in the American prairie,
it keeps its face.
I don’t lose my way.
Every dream is huge,
but you can only live
a part of a dream at a time.
It will remain long enough
until I am gone.
A sea once covered this land.
A sea may come back.
The railroad in front of the emptiness
where my mother lived, is there,
and maybe, like a road,
that should have an end, the
sea will cover the ties,
drop silt on their iron,
and the death of my mother
will be complete.
Only the howling will remain.
The crying out in the night
for her lost son killed in a war.
That ghost haunted my sleep.
The siren of disaster
that announced his end
filled my soul with a dead sorrow.
Every year
I set aside a moment
to toast his sacrifice,
his courage.
The wound to our hearts
never healed.
It just disappeared
as my family died one by one.
I am left,
among the last,
and treasure his life
however short it was.
I toast her,
and honor her cloak of anguish.
It is raining outside,
appropriate remembering her.
I toast the rain,
the tears she shed,
and the others who vanished.
She still screams.
I hear her sometimes
frightened from my sleep.
My brother is silent.
Perhaps
they have something now
I don’t have,
seeing the circle close
on all our lives.