Today's poem is by Barbara Siegel Carlson

After a Terrorist Attack
        November 2015

The city square is buried in leaves. I pick up a yellow one, almost weightless but limp in my hand like the yellow star my friend showed me once—its thin cloth held in her palm—the star her father was forced to wear over his heart. I touched the tiny stitch holes around each point. What is it the holes can't say? The leaves whisper around my feet. More are shaken down and people trample them: the man smoking a cigarette, the mother pushing a stroller, the guy staring at his cell phone.

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Copyright © 2023 Barbara Siegel Carlson All rights reserved
from What Drifted Here
Cherry Grove Collections
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission