When we left, the lamb
was still a lamb.
When we returned, he had become
skin and rattled breath. I was ten.
The only death I’d seen till then
was a hamster, stiff as cardboard in its cage.
Then, too, I’d left, to sleep; in the morning
returned to find him stone.
The hamster left; would not return.
In the barn the lamb had not yet left.
One moist unblinking eye still shone
black and sightless toward the upper loft.
The other burrowed in bedding hay
unchanged. I was ten.
The vet told my mother nothing
could be done, and left. My father
had already left. He returned,
but we were gone by then.
–
Hannah Silverstein is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Passengers Journal, Passages North, Barnstorm Journal, Dialogist, Orange Blossom Review, West Trestle Review, Cider Press Review, LEON Literary Review, Whale Road Review, and others. She lives in Vermont.