Sweet Rye & Timothy
You imagine that you’ve learned all there is to
know about
death now that he’s been
lowered into the ground & his small plot of earth is
blessed for eons to come, but, in a fenced pasture on the far
side of the church cemetery, a farmer
has sown an
acre or two in
rye & sweet timothy, a heavenly fragrance, his
daughter’s aged pony’s enduring love beyond that one love
he has each day for the young girl, his mistress.
You think now
how the one who’s been
buried beneath still yearns to reach out & somehow be-
come the green slurry, that chewed pulp dripping from the pony’s maw.
If you are still standing there at the gravesite
thinking that
you know every-
thing there is to know about death, look to the sky above,
now heaven’s color or what you once believed heaven must be.
Terry Savoie has had nearly four hundred poems published in journals here and abroad over the past four decades. These include APR, Ploughshares, Tar River, The Iowa Review, Commonweal and North American Review as well as recent or forthcoming issues of The American Journal of Poetry, One, Bluestem, Cortland Review, Chiron Review and Birmingham Poetry Review, among others. His chapbook, Reading Sunday, won the Bright Hill Competition and was published in the spring of 2018.