Today's poem is by Suzanne Cleary

The War
        after Peter Dreher

Leaving the apartment where he'd spent the war,
he saw the water glass beside the sink

and turned back, filled it,
drank, took it,

having seen his future:
to begin each day

with a new painting of the glass,
one day full of water, the next day less, then less,

his future spent, as necessary, refilling
this cheap transportable world,

breakable but never broken,
never drunk from again

except by the air,
which has no end of thirst.

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Copyright © 2024 Suzanne Cleary All rights reserved
from The Manhattan Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission