Brother Song by Greg Watson

Brother Song

Brother, have you at last earned
the peace and solitude
which somehow eluded you
on this side of the earth?
Perhaps you speak now in ways
I cannot hope to understand:
the repeating parentheses
of gently falling snow,
insistent pulse of a birch tapping
against the window glass,
sudden shock of a crow wing torn
and frozen to the sidewalk.
You, who saved up your words
like trinkets for a rainy day,
offer no reply but this,
the space you have shaped
to your former image.
Or perhaps your silence has
become your song at last,
the one you had been secretly
rehearsing all along.

by Greg Watson

Editor’s Note: Beautiful imagery carries the grief in this poem with careful hands, emphasizing how loss never quite feels like the right ending for the living left behind.