Love lost late in life; love lost,
for that matter, ever; love lost
is the sadness only clouds can float above—
oh, is that what holds them up, all the love
lovers don't know where to put, when their one
is gone? Clouds raining tears
onto the gardens of lovers left behind, for years.
Then is that why flying in the skies I feel so sad,
though I am going to, going to the love
I almost lost because I thought I was above
giving what a lover needs?
What a terrible gardener I would make!
I want to grab unopened envelopes of seeds
and run to other gardeners; beg them: Take.
Poet Kate Light is the author of Gravity’s Dream (Donald Justice Award), Open Slowly, and The Laws of Falling Bodies (Nicholas Roerich Prize), and of the texts of two works for narrator and musicians, The World Beneath the Waves (originally Oceanophony) and Einstein’s Mozart: Two Geniuses. She is also the librettist of The Life and Love of Joe Coogan (an opera based on The Dick Van Dyke Show), and her lyrics to the song “Here Beside Me” are heard in Disney’s Mulan II. Kate has been visiting professor at Cornell University and at the Musashino Art University in Tokyo. Her poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, Hudson Review, Washington Post Book World, Feminist Studies, Carolina Quarterly, The Formalist, The Dark Horse, New York Sun, the anthologies Western Wind, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, and Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems for Hard Times (and four times on his radio show “The Writer’s Almanac”). She is also a professional violinist.
