Poetry by D. Dina Friedman
Live in the layers/Not on the litter
Stanley Kunitz
I.
Carcasses of trees severed from roots fog the forward path. We step over branches with browning
leaves, chilled in the poison breath of the wind.
II.
Soon the trunks will be shredded for lumber to keep the machinery of the world running. My friend
so desperate, he might send his daughter over the bridge alone to face the guards at the border.
III.
How do we hold ourselves up when we’re paper puppets in the wind? Where my friend waits to
cross, the river is rising and the litter swirls. On my beautiful side of the planet, the trees and wires
are down. I am helpless to help him.
IV.
I picture my friend and his daughter in my home between the mountain and the river, eating hot
tomato soup and looking out the window from their quarantine to admire the tree whose limb
plunged in the microburst, barely missing the roof.
V.
The forked branch landed by the front door, its crown of red leaves blocking the path. We thought
we had an antidote for locked borders. We thought underneath the trunk of a uniform, a pathway to
a softer heart.
VI.
The children whirl through the muddy camp like litter between layers of heartless words that leave
no space for a sun drawn with a green marker on a scrap of paper grabbed from the gale.
VII.
Who am I to hug a dying tree? To smile because the sky is blue and the sun is shining? It’s shredding
day. I’ll make tomato soup and freeze it for sparser times, then march the papers to the truck that
splits them into litter, spaghetti in the wind.
D. Dina Friedman has published widely in literary journals and received two Pushcart Prize nominations. She’s the author of Escaping Into the Night (Simon and Schuster), Playing Dad’s Song (Farrar, Straus, Giroux) and one poetry chapbook, Wolf in the Suitcase (Finishing Line Press). Visit her website: www.ddinafriedman.com.
