Rivulets of scent, dust,
wind-borne debris,
bent straw and bee music,
the shrunken honeysuckle
evaporating from the year,
a few flies passing nearby
swept a fraction sideways
by the air—
at any given moment
something rare and exact
will have happened here,
where the spirit lies down,
gone dormant,
whose life this was,
whose life was (all of it,
from end to end)
one summer.
Roo Borson has won both the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize. Her eleventh book, Rain; Road; An Open Boat, was published in 2012.
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