Inside grief, there is a field
so familiar to me, like the scent
of a baby or the silence inside a car.
The flowers are scarce, but wild,
and shadows appear as they should,
snaked dark within the wrinkles
of rock walls, scribbled under briars.
The losses are not always obvious
and almost always unknown,
but death knows my address by heart—
and each time I wake in the field
I waste all my hours there
flapping my invisible wings.
CL O’Dell lives in the Hudson Valley, New York State. He edits the online literary magazine the Paris-American.
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This article appears in the 16 Mar 2022 issue of the New Statesman, Russia’s War Goes Global