WORLD VOICES

THIS IS THE ONE WHO WILL LEAVE
  BY KERRY HARDIE


Contents

Home
Introduction
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Thrush
Last Swim of the Day
Negation
The Satin Gown
October
Protecting the Buds
She Will Try Again to
     Recover Again

The Rough and the Smooth
A man died in the valley
     today,

What Happened to the
     Soviet Union

After the Prize
Porcelain Man
Being Here
Fear
On Reading Michael
     Longley's Snow Water

Reflection
Waning
Emigration Photo
California
Letter from the Old World
     to a Brother in the New

Sky
Domestic War
Grace
Freda Kahlo Goes Native
All Saints

World Voices Home

The Literary Explorer
Writers on the Job
Books Forgotten
Thomas E. Kennedy
Walter Cummins
Web Del Sol



Waning

Some days you wake in July,
but by evening it's gone to September.

Yesterday it was August all day,
the thistledown drifted the roads.

Just the same, it was hard to trust life.
All that I love is alive and already ceasing.

Hoarding old bones—the splinters of saints—
would be saner. In the fields

they were reaping, the sounds drawing closer.
then circling away down the meadow.

How can we love
when love must watch life cease to live?

How can we not
when downy seeds blow the ripe roads?