Whose Body

It’s half past July.
The trunk of the backyard tree
lies beneath your hand.
A smell of moss
crosses the yellow wood.
It was the wind broke it,
the wind in the night.

See the ladybug. She works her way up
the bare stump
like a tiny VW,
anxious for her children
in the burning house.
A worm pokes a blind head
above the cracked ground.
The ferns pretend 
to be asleep.
Beyond the fence, the willows
are grave in stillness.
The sun blinds the eastern arc of the sky.

It holds its breath.
Even the stone beneath your knee.
Then it crosses the silence
on great wings
toward the future.

_____

Christopher Bernard is a novelist, poet, critic and essayist. His poetry collection The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award in 2021. He is also a founder and co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His children’s books If You Ride a Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment of Biestia will be published this fall and featured in Kirkus Reviews in November.