Issue Seventeen – December 2010

On Saying Goodbye

By Jill McCabe Johnson

And if I loved you, I could say, stay with me.
Istvan Laszlo Geher 

Another day in a city of days
          where the sun doles light,
and work numbs like a jigger of gray,

          gray as the sidewalk where we walk.
Where maple leaves
          filter brightness in metered doses of green.

And if a crow lay motionless
          but for the tremor of her wings,
would we not curb our wretchedness,

          like the crow’s mate  in the branches above us,
who protects his beloved
          from the early grief in his call?

But no, the crow in the tree cries simply, stay with me,
          and our sidewalk crow,
crippled and scarred, answers, stay.

© Jill McCabe Johnson

Jill McCabe Johnson is the author of the poetry collections Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown, Pendulum, and Diary of the One Swelling Sea, and the nonfiction chapbook Borderlines. She is the founder and publisher of Wandering Aengus Press, and teaches English at Skagit Valley College.

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