Today's poem is by Rashna Wadia

Burial
       

From a window I watch

                the librarian kneel
        in the parking lot as if to pray.

He bows his head. Pleats the soil.
        Tucks a sapling into a box

                like a casket.

So many hearses loop by the library
        when I visit. I wonder why

                it's quiet today.
        No sirens. No circling gulls.

I'm eight and I want to ask him
        about the word, undertaker,

                why he dresses the rootlets,
        irons dirt with his hands.

Beside the boarded homes
and broken beer bottles

                kids my age sit on the curb
of Prospect Street and wait.

None of us know what green is
yet, how we will grow,

                rewilding over concrete.

Watercress, fistfuls of mint,
        sugar maples. Lobed

                to camouflage what remains
        cuffed, to the chain-link fence.

Copyright © 2024 Rashna Wadia All rights reserved
from wildness
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission