Becky Kennedy
Selected Poems
becky kennedy
To Remember
Here in the world, this curve of
shadow, it’s late for searching;
the houses wait to enter
the cloth of night. Midsentence,
lawns disappear; memory
renders the garden, darkness
taking on the color of
what’s gone, the quick, the widowed
stalks, willows like lost rivers
that held the green shade, but it’s
late for seeing: like summer’s
light, remembering’s longest
when it first comes to us. The
room’s thick with deep pine dark; now
the photos lining the shelves
are no longer understood;
how I’d give anything to
see you again. There’s so much
to tell you; you’re not here to
learn there was, after all, no
destination; the years were
dispersed; the trail of stars was
undiminished; morning will,
like all absence, suddenly
arrive—but late for finding,
which is what forgetting is.
Becky Kennedy
This Sound
Days like this, easy to be
happy in the garden, the
slapping wind, and the coiled sky:
time, northlit, eventual,
blows through us in the largeness
of dawn, and the ganglia
of the branches, the color
that breaks into the leaves. And
the flower of sound, the white
uprising: bare music of
the wild geese crying, that can’t
go on, must fly. What do we
want now with autumn fresh with
disappearance, and the slicked
streets, worry of quick knees, the
cradled face taut over the
small, mapped bones, the thickening
where the heart would be, wanting
to live forever on days
like this when we can’t go on.
How light turns to brightness; how
morning pushes through—this sound.
Becky Kennedy is a linguist and a college professor. Her work has appeared in a number of journals, on Verse Daily, and in three chapbooks; her poetry has been anthologized and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Featured in:
Red Rock Review
Issue 55
