Everything I love is here:
water, green with algae bloom,
or deoxygenated and gray,
supporting a flock of mergansers;
stubble in a corn field out the train window;
cherry trees, too baffled by the February
warmth to break bud, except the one,
sheltered in a courtyard and innocent,
in its petals, of the future;
bittersweet, eating its way south
kudzu bounding north, all strangling
vines and matted landscape;
the hot, empty sky; stars
which we no longer see; I tell you
of the Milky Way and constellations,
and you imagine darkness
thick enough to reveal them; bark beetles
stripping naked the bodies of red pines;
the soil, poisoned, compacted, still trying
to give; and the people – oh, lord, the people –
how I long to take each one
in my arms and let them cry
while we watch
an orange moon.
Sonja Johanson has recent work appearing in the Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, and Poet Lore. She divides her time between work in Massachusetts and her home in the mountains of western Maine.