for Beth

She scrawled soft words in soap: “Never Forget,”
Dove-white on her car’s window, and the wren,
because her heart is tender, might regret
it called the sun to wake her.
                                             As I slept,
she heard lost names recounted, one by one.

She wrote in sidewalk chalk: “Never Forget,”
and kept her heart’s own counsel.
                                                    No rain swept
away those words, no tear leaves them undone.

Because her heart is tender with regret,
bruised by razed towers’ glass and steel and stone
that shatter on and on and on and on…
she stitches in damp linen: “NEVER FORGET,”
and listens to her heart’s emphatic song.

The wren might tilt its head and sing along
because its heart once understood regret
when fledglings fell beyond, beyond, beyond
its reach, and still the boot-heeled world strode on.

She writes in adamant: “NEVER FORGET”
because her heart is tender with regret..

Michael R. Burch lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his lovely wife Beth, their handsome son Jeremy, and seven outrageously spoiled puppies. His poetry has been translated into Farsi, Russian, Italian, Macedonian, Vietnamese and Gjuha Shqipe (Albanian) and his poems, essays, articles, short stories and letters have appeared over 900 times in publications such as Light Quarterly, The Lyric, The Chariton Review, Writer’s Digest, Erosha, Verse Libre and Unlikely Stories. Mike Burch is also the editor of The HyperTexts.

Poems After the Attack collection > Table of Contents