That apparition on the line,
Alone, that child’s dress,
Was lost; found, it dries,
A drying petal, drying leaf.
Wild at the wind’s caress,
The cipher dances for the skies,
Her cloth of purple waves
And drops drying into stone.
Pinned, the orphan flies:
Her bodice, skirt and sleeve
A flower, pennant and balloon,
A child cleansed of mess.
So enduring dwarfs the trees
And tawdry yard, a shrine
To hope hollowed out by loss,
A gull’s circling cries.
The grey and rain are gone,
The drenching, chilling of the dress;
Hard the rag becomes that dries,
Dry the spring of grief.
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Seán Monagle is a poet and translator. Five of his poems appeared in Manos Sucias/Dirty Hands, a fine press chapbook issued by Traffic Street Press in January 2019. Another five poems will appear fall 2020 in Battery Journal. He collaborated with Anzhelika Khyznhya on the translation of Mykola Bazhan’s “The Hops of Green Legs” in Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul: Mykola (Nik) Bazhan’s Early Experimental Poetry (Academic Studies Press 2020). They are completing a translation of Moisei Fishbeyn’s The Prophet (Пророк).
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