Earth felt the wound
—John Milton
After two decades of growing
where we planted it beneath
the window, the New Dawn
still shocks each year with blossoms.
Petals fall and fall and keep falling
as the red bricks of the sidewalk
grow stippled with pink tongues
that sing in sorrow:
I am falling . . . watch me fall.
Yet they gather here as if the moon
in darkness had married the sun;
as if to bless again
the ancient wedding of the first couple
when roses lay down their petals
at the feet of the new bride.
Each morning we are greeted
by this beautiful, tender detritus,
and wake to sweep away
the sweet confetti of spring’s return
and letting go. Morning
after morning they continue to sing
I am falling . . . watch me fall,
a chant to echo what we are,
since what we are is fallen.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 28, Issue 1.
V.P. Loggins is the author of The Wild Severance (2021), winner of the 26th Annual Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Competition, The Green Cup (2017), winner of the Cider Press Review Editors’ Book Prize, The Fourth Paradise (Editor’s Select Poetry Series, Main Street Rag 2010), and Heaven Changes (Pudding House Chapbook Series 2007). He has also published one book on Shakespeare, The Life of Our Design, and he is co-author of another, Shakespeare’s Deliberate Art. His poems and articles have appeared in The Baltimore Review, Chiron Review, Crannog (Ireland), The Dalhousie Review (Canada), The Midwest Quarterly, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Southern Review, among others.
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