The Morning After
by Diane Lockward
The sun wasn’t where it was supposed to be,
wasn’t up when it should have been up,
and couldn’t have been down—
too early for that,
early enough that the goldfinches
should have been singing
and they were there perched
in the evergreens but not
singing, not flying beneath the blue sky,
the sky so blue it must have been morning
and the doves, as if to prove they knew
what mourning meant, stopped
cooing. She was still breathing,
alive to the wind, the cold on her skin,
cold yet summer still.
And the roses, in aftershock, froze
their petals and silenced the bees
and beetles in the pistils. No buzzing now
as they circled her head,
and above her no sun, no heat, no song
from the birds, no attar in the air, and what,
she wondered, had happened to the sun,
the reliable sun that never failed
to show up, but today hadn’t
shown up, leaving her
like the woman who reaches for a peach
but finds only an empty branch,
the tree barren, the sun gone from the sky.
Diane Lockward is the author of The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop and three poetry books, most recently Temptation by Water. Her previous books are What Feeds Us, which received the 2006 Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize, and Eve’s Red Dress. Her poems have been included in such journals as Harvard Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her work has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Gwarlingo, and The Writer’s Almanac.