Among the Fallen

By Judy Kaber

            After Sky Through Trees by Lois Dodd


If I declare that the woods hold a door,
that the red earth sprouts stalks, shivers

like a teenage girl, twisted and fallen,
would you ask how we can get 

through it, how so young a girl can
feel so much despair, how trees can

slice the air like that, how the sky
becomes plastic, almost silver

instead of blue? If you climb this hill
of disarray, are you drawn to the door,

do you crave it, even if you don’t know
what lies on the other side, even if your face

turns to glass, sharp and echoing?

Sit down. We’ll picnic. Bread.
Wine. All the letters of the alphabet

slopping like soup from our hands.
Was there a house there once? I swear

I see a barn caught aloft in branches,
in a swirl of lines. We’re all headed

for that door. It looks so clean here,
not a rope astray, not a feather dropped.

No pistol. No whip. No wet cloth
bound across the mouth. The trees not

silhouettes of us. Not our story. Our story
lies on the other side of that door. 

Maybe we’ll find pain, a gleam of loveliness, 
a girl sitting breathless in a room.

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Judy Kaber is the Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine, and author of three chapbooks: Renaming the Seasons, In Sleep We Are All the Same, and, most recently, A Pandemic Alphabet. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Poet Lore, december, Hunger Mountain, and Spillway. She won the 2021 Maine Poetry Contest and was a finalist for a 2022 Maine Literary Award. Judy lives and writes in Maine.

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