Song at the End of the World

(for Joe Bolton, and the rest of us watching it burn)

⸻

Say this life,

and let it be enough,

for once.

Say:

I watched the sky turn brass and thought it beautiful.

I kissed someone not because I believed in tomorrow

but because I didn’t.

Say:

We knew the oceans were dying.

We still went swimming.

We knew the war was coming.

We still laid out bread,

and touched each other lightly,

as if the body were not already archive.

Say:

We remembered songs we hadn’t heard in years.

Not for comfort —

but for their silence between the notes.

The way forgetting sounds

right before it happens.

Say:

We woke each day unsure what for

and went on living anyway —

the way ruins hold rainwater

without asking why.

Say:

We were careful not to make sense.

We let the story break,

so the light could get in.

Say:

We saw ourselves, luminous and still,

half in love with what would be lost.

Held there —

like the pause before a falling star

for no one.

And still.

Say this life.

Let it be enough.

Gravesong (First Day of Summer)

for the ones I could not find

I stood at the grave of more than one father.

The sun hung low, swollen with knowing.

The air already thick with heat,

like something waiting to bloom or to break.

A quiet presence beside me.

The others absent —

still holding wounds sharper than stone.

I left my silence with the dead

and turned toward the hill

where my mother’s ghosts sleep.

Forty days after one death, came another.

Grandfather.

The soft pillar behind the louder men.

I used to know the place —

next to her, next to the cypress,

a rusted fence that once framed their resting.

But the last war

tore the cemetery open.

A corner bombed.

A tree felled —

it lay like a broken god across their names.

Today, the tree was gone.

The fence, too.

No sign of them.

I walked in circles,

sweating, swearing, praying,

in that quiet fever

called remembrance.

The land did not answer.

Even memory seemed afraid.

And I, a son of many ghosts,

left the graves to the sky.

To the sun.

To the first fire of summer.

But later, in the hush of evening,

I asked a question —

not with a ring,

but with a tremor of “what if.”

And he said yes.

And somewhere between

the craters and the cicadas,

a door opened.

Not out of joy alone,

but out of shelter.

Out of love that builds

even under sirens.

Out of the long dream

of somewhere else,

where cypresses stand

for peace, not mourning.

For My Mother, on a Day Like Today

You once said

you’d run with us under your arms—

my sister in one, me flailing in the other—

like we were firewood

and you the whole burning house.

You once said

you celebrated thirty a long time ago

and laughed like someone

who knew too well what came after.

But you are still the first door I knock on

when the sky cracks,

when the day folds into itself

like a badly drawn breath.

You are still the only mirror

I trust not to lie.

Today, I bring you no grand gift—

just this stitched-up thing,

this poem with one knee scraped,

the other still learning how to bow.

You, who strung a laundry line for my dreams,

still let them air, even when they sag.

You, who danced the new year

with knees that had long given notice—

you are the rhythm I return to

when I forget how to move.

And maybe this is all I know of grace:

to see you light a cigarette

with the same hand that fed me.

To see you fall silent,

but never give up your voice.

To know that when you say

“I’ll see you in the fall,”

you always mean

“Come home.”