September Again

This month of your birth
has crept in upon me again,
slipped over the window sill
and into the corner of my room
where a perfect square of moonlight
seems to have up taken residence
and, outside, where the birds,
a whole choir of them, whose names
you never bothered to learn even when
mother recited them over and over again
as she pointed to the secret places
she thought they were hiding
under eaves or in the tangled branches,
are singing their hearts out
as she would always say then
and where now the boisterous cicadas
are joining in that twilight overture
which never engaged you either
as much as the translucent amber shells
they left pinned to the soft sienna bark
of the circled pines long after they slipped
through the narrow slits in their backs
and travelled on and where now you are
the one who has left the shell of your body
and flown on and where I am the one
who is empty, broken, holding on alone.

---

Poet and photographer Margaret B. Ingraham was born in Atlanta, GA, and “grew up” exploring the woods behind her childhood home. She is the author of a poetry chapbook Proper Words for Birds (Finishing Line Press), nominated for the 2010 Library of Virginia Award in poetry; of This Holy Alphabet (Paraclete Press, 2009), lyric poems adapted from her original translation from the Hebrew of Psalm 119; and of a poetry collection Exploring this Terrain (Paraclete Press, 2020). Ingraham is the recipient of an Academy of American Poetry Award, a Sam Ragan Prize, and numerous residential Fellowships at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Ingraham resides in Alexandria, VA

[image: crows in treetops | samane mohammadi]