Poetry |

“On the Island of Sark” and “October 8th”

On the Island of Sark

 

 

You, gorse: I slow my steps

around the thorns you bare to take

 

the blood of the unaware.

You put forth your yellow blooms

 

next to a footbridge strung

between two cliffs — a dizzying drop.

 

People arrive on the ferry. Others depart.

What’s peril for us is easy for you:

 

you thrive in a gale-force wind;

you can’t be shipwrecked or drowned.

 

You scrawl your name in places

only the gulls know how to patrol.

 

Sure as a god of your right to exist,

you watch the daylong changes in the tide.

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

October 8th

 

 

He left a letter for family and friends

in his apartment, on his desk,

 

and climbed out of the window toward

his terrible pact with gravity.

 

Which must be why I dreamt

I saw my husband about to do the same.

 

I shouted Stop! and he stopped

though he was weeping: he wanted to go.

 

My cry woke both of us,

my husband’s arm touching mine.

 

The letter my friend left

said we couldn’t have held him back.

Contributor
Jennifer Barber

Jennifer Barber’s fourth full-length collection, The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made, was published by The Word Works (2022). She founded the literary journal Salamander in 1992 and served as its editor in chief until 2018. She is the poet laureate of Brookline, MA.

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