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| “Rising Cairn” by Celeste Roberge |
from grief, the prickled ball in my heart
The tank imprinting the sands in Gaza.
The baby on the kibbutz, snatched from its mother’s arms.
Grief as breath and breath as grief
pictures of the dead, the missing
slapped on our bland screens. We might know
this child, his laugh. This teen. She worked for peace.
Grief for the plume of smoke outside the window
of the hospital, for the doctor, searching her pockets
as if she might have stashed a pill she’d forgotten,
that could save the life of a patient, writhing, dying.
Grief, the crevice in the land split by the river
where you think you might walk down and disappear.
Grief, a drained lake, a parched throat, a bombed city,
a soldier singing O Sole Mio in the desert at night
because, sometimes, there’s nothing else to do
but raise your head to the moon
and sing as if your life depended on it.
D. Dina Friedman has published in over a hundred literary journals and anthologies (including Rattle, The Sun, Calyx, Lilith, Negative Capability, Chautauqua Literary Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, and Rhino) and received four Pushcart Prize nominations. She is the author of two young adult novels: Escaping Into the Night (Simon and Schuster) and Playing Dad’s Song (Farrar, Straus, Giroux), a short-story collection: Immigrants(Creators Press), and two chapbooks: Wolf in the Suitcase (Finishing Line Press) and Here in Sanctuary—Whirling (Querencia Press).