A Tidings of Magpies

Those visits home, the way the young by Marianne Boruch   Those visits home, the way the young come back and still follow you around or find you on the bed reading or writing, to lie down at an angle or sit cross-legged. No secret between you, not even trouble quite though it isn't ordinary, the way the world unravels through them: what he said, what she never, who traveled where, that things— how exactly—splinter and break and cut. It trails off then. Both of you, which one to speak but thinking better of it. And the book is just a prop, what you were writing perfectly weightless in this silence. Child, oh fully no longer, out there tangling, untangling.

The Acacia Trees Derek Walcott III You see those breakers coming around Pigeon Island bowing like nuns in a procession? One thing I know, when you're gone like my other friends, not to Thailand or Russia, but wherever it is loved friends go with their different beliefs, who were like a flock of seagulls leaving the mirror of the sand, or a bittern passing lonely Barrel of Beef, or the sails that an egret hoists leaving its rock; I go down to the same sea by another road with manchineel shadows and stunted sea grapes dwarfed by the wind. I carry something to read: the wind is bright and shadows race like grief, I open their books and see their distant shapes approaching and always arriving, their voices heard in the page of a cloud, like the soft surf in my head. please note: art by Linda Amundsen