This week’s poem memorializes the night of a particular tragedy. In a poem, as in life, it is often the smallest of sensory details that sticks with us – in this case, it’s the buzzing of flies, heard as if for the first time.
A longtime professor of English at St. Joseph’s College, Edward Rielly is the author of many books, including poetry, nonfiction, and picture books.
Left at Home
By Edward J. Rielly
That night of drowning
the boy didn’t know
his brother’s face was under water,
body swirling
in black rushing terror
and wetness.
Didn’t know for hours,
long after his parents
and the brother’s wife
and the priest summoned
to the river knew,
watching divers churn up mud
and silt, startle fish, looking
for a drowned man’s body.
At home with an older cousin
he washed the supper dishes,
dried carefully, noting
how, on the dried dishes,
under the bright kitchen light,
flies landed, kept landing,
marking each plate and cup
with black marks, alive, fluttering,
buzzing with a sound
he had never heard before.
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is Portland’s poet laureate. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 1994 Edward J. Rielly. First published My Struggling Soil, Whitby, Ontario, Canada: The Plowman, 1994, and appears here by permission of the author.
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