By Susan Thomas
The jeweled air — the sun so clear
you look for the flowering apricot tree,
and smell the bitter scent of hawthorn
in your heart--
but the thorn has dried out, and skeletal plants
weave black threads into the clear blue sky,
in the empty vault of heaven, and the hollow earth
rings with every footstep.
Silence, all around: from far away you only
hear the gusting of the wind, from the orchards
and gardens, the fragile descent of leaves. It is
the cold summer of the dead.
