Night Shift in the Home for Convalescents

A poem for Sunday

There is much in this drawer that is no longer in use:
a notebook with ribbon to mark passages
once of some importance, a tortoiseshell comb sadly
made of tortoise shell, a prayer book bound
in mother-of-pearl. Mother-of-pearl.
And sounds: a blurring of bees in the air
no longer heard in the wild.
Everything at once, she had said. All that you
remember must be written down.
Bed linens sailing the wind, curtains flaring
beyond the windscreens, lilacs soon to lie on the ground.
There was a quickening in the heart whenever I saw him
standing in a field of bloom and hum then suddenly not there.
The field gone. The house. The road now under a newer road.
Trees along it long cut down. No canopy of hope.
And the swamp? Who knows what became of it.
Skunk cabbage and buttercups, cattails,
polliwogs and crayfish with their pulse-train song.
We caught them in jars of pond water.
Not for eating, no. To watch them live.
Wash your mother’s clothes one last time and put them away—
like wrapping a scoop of snow in tissue paper.

This poem has been excerpted from the collection You Are Here, edited by Ada Limón.