The Journal of Mythic Arts: Poetry: Two Poems by Jane Yolen

October 13, 2007

Two Poems by Jane Yolen

After He Died

Did he see his daughter with her daughter
frantically driving home
from a New York City holiday,
her car maneuvering potholes
more surely than she maneuvered
the sudden hole in her heart?
Did he see her fighting the tears,
her nine year old daughter's fear
of returning to the house of death?
Did he know they would walk in
greeted with the relieving news
that his body was already gone?
Did he sigh like a whisper of wind,
or laugh with the freedom of letting go
of that thinned-out old body,
with the Auschwitz legs and protruding ribs,
the blinded eyes, the ears that could no longer
hear the difference between crow and not-crow?
Did he shake his head, finding himself
out of body, in the ether, perilously close
to some great being called God?
Or did he just, as he always supposed,
simply evaporate, becoming earth and sky,
ember and ash and, at the last, birdsong.

The Garden in April

Some small green shoots have already
broken out into daffodil grins.
Bunched roots of peonies
point green fingers toward the sky.
Dogwood and magnolia have burst
blossoms at the seams.
As always iris and lilies spread
like Atilla and his hordes
across borders, counties, countries.

It is spring. Everything in nature returns.
Everything.
So why are you not here,
rising up from my garden
as you used to rise from our bed?
From the brass double bed where our children
slept with us, or the new wooden bed
queen size, big enough for two complicated sleepers
after the children had gone out on their own.
Or the hospital bed, single and sterile,
where you died
in the middle of a March thaw.

April has returned to me everything,
everything but what means the most,
for I can dig deep in the garden,
down below the root system
and still not find you.