Poem in Late October, with Lines from Limón

Luisa A. Igloria

Oct 30

                    "The war.      The war.        The war."                                                                     - Ada Limón, from "The Hurting Kind"   Like you, I have always been a weeper           from a long line of weepers. No one escapes the documentary of days—there's no end to the delivery           of ruin and rubble, pictures of blasted hospitals where  children clutch their torn chests as their mothers' fingers           try to comb ashes out of their hair. I have dreams of running  through landscapes of flattened dunes and decimated gardens.          And today is grief again, is feeling the same wounds torn open  before any chance to heal. Yesterday I woke up and the rumble           in the street was trash bins falling on their sides after the trucks  set them down, though not carefully.  A friend dropped off fruit          from her tree, globes of orange so warm beside the small  dead bird she found on the front stoop. Every little thing, brushed         with omen or sadness before someone has even pinned it to the wall.