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Ode to November
by Lorraine Healy

November, you brought me
into the world without fanfare,
you stole
my father who could not
have loved you more
and it was a different hemisphere
but it was you, November,
you who shrug off my grief,
my graying hair.

You made the jacarand
ás blossom
over Buenos Aires and anywhere I walked
their blue showered the broken
sidewalks and the city getting sorrier
by the year. Paths of tiny trumpets
almost violet with blueness, I didn
t
want any other gift.

And here so far away you give me
everywhere-rain
rain beyond clouds, rain falling sideways
and upwards—
and this year a load of wet snow
which you promptly froze over
and cold we could not chase away
with firewood
while my father
s lonely bones in Buenos Aires
welcomed the tenth summer
over his grave.

No deal, November. I will never
trade my birth for his immense
death. He loved you dearly
and you took him out of a Sunday
dripping with sunlight,
made by the gods.

So you and I stay grey, November.
Unforgiven. Your thieving smile knocked
on a window pane that morning.
And stupid me who swung it wide.

 


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