This week’s poem, by Éireann Lorsung, is one of late summer, memory and grief. I love this poem’s vividly tangible August imagery, its tender litany of mourning rituals, and its searching candor as it reckons with loss and how to hold it.
Lorsung is the author of “The Century” (2020), “Her Book” (2013) and “Music For Landing Planes By” (2007), all published by Milkweed Editions. A 2016 National Endowment for the Arts fellow in prose and the winner of the 2021 Maine Book Award for Poetry, she lives in Portland.
Along the Leie, fields full of the memory
By Éireann Lorsung
Along the Leie, fields full of the memory
of flax, night turning now to August, dark
sky’s small lights doubled in the river;
under our sleeping windows where the hush of air
is crossing low lands from the ocean, the beautiful
boy comes with his hair shining in the headlights
like gold.
Nothing but cliché can be spoken
of the dead, who live in their own distant cities,
who are whole and perfect and singly battered
by death, the smallness of the body surrounded
by its corona of broken windshield. All that remains
to say is a shrine our words will not
approach—so we plant trees, lay thin white
stones, leave candles in red jars, say novenas, make
up the sense of something missing
with bears and ribbons, roadside photographs, credible
apparitions, letters, avoidance, a small x
on a map—but there is something missing,
regardless of belief, and we know it: in the cool
night air which bears its stars dispassionately,
with no thought for our need or lack
of language, the bodies of boys outline themselves
in roadside grasses, where water will pool
in late winter, where red and pink poppies will blow
among cornflowers, wild roses; where the tiny, pale blue
star-shaped earthly blossoms of the flax spell out their names
in multitude, in languages beyond the ones we know.
n.b. The Leie is a river in East Flanders, where the author lived for many years.
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Along the Leie, fields full of the memory,” copyright © 2021 by Éireann Lorsung, appears by permission of the author.
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