Winner of the 2024 Maine Postmark Poetry Contest, held in conjunction with the Belfast Poetry Festival.
cw: suicide
Early this morning I heard
the whip-poor-will singing from a branch in the dark.
When the sun came up, he was silent and impossible
to see, likely already gone from the tree.
Later, I cut up a melon,
holding one half in my hand,
round and heavy with juice as
I scooped out the seeds.
The melon was perfect, tasting cool
and delicious, not too hard, yielding
gentle wafts of summer sweetness
at the start of an ordinary day.
Last week, my dearest friend of thirty years
took her life. She hung from a branch of an olive tree
on a hillside in Umbria, in the orchard next
to her rose garden just beginning to bloom.
Her husband, inconsolable with grief
will never know why. Nor will I.
As we grow old, our losses mount and grow heavy.
How to bear the load?
So, I carry my mug of coffee to the window,
searching the sky, blue and fat with clouds.
I close my eyes, hoping to recall her voice
saying, “tell me the details of the details.”
Katharine Davis
Katharine Davis lives in York, Maine and is the author of three novels: Capturing Paris, East Hope(winner of the Maine Writers Prize for fiction in 2010), and A Slender Thread. She won the Maine Postmark Poetry contest in 2024. Her poems have appeared in Bluebird Word and Gargoyle.
