風の電話
When Itaru Sasaki lost his cousin in 2010, he decided to build a glass-paneled phone booth in his hilltop garden with a disconnected rotary phone inside for communicating with his lost relative. – Atlas Obscura
The bereft roam the hillside,
carry grief like a hollow bowl,
never empty, never full. They wander
against the September glare
or hush through January snow.
I wonder myself there
in your anniversary days, the cusp
of solstice, the sense of the door you closed
so close, perpetually the moment
between fracture and howl.
Unlatching the glass box, I whisper
inside, stand on the bracings of time,
the cool of the receiver against my ear.
Are you there?
Are you anywhere
without the ballast of bones?
With the ash of your ears,
what do you make of these words
tossed like stones into the wind?
Take them, father.
Build a cairn
so that one day I may find my way home.
Header photograph © Liz Baronofsky.
Patricia Caspers is an award-winning poet, journalist and columnist. Her full-length poetry collection, In the Belly of the Albatross, is available from Glass Lyre Press. Her work has appeared in journals such Ploughshares, Spillway, Sugar House Review and Terrain. She lives with her family in Northern California where she peddles a love of literature to small children.