Her Words

Silent, the girl holds a pale blue cigar box.
She stands in thick dusk, both hands holding
the closed coffin at heart level, ready,
offering it to the ground. It has been lightly raining
on and off for days. Early May, layers of yellow-green
lighten the quick, darkening air.
That small body was still soft when she found him,
pliable when she gently folded him into a torn, white t-shirt—
the innocent out of pain.
This ground does not resist the shovel.
Yet, digging still takes longer
than I want it to take, for the longer we wait
the more we’ll remember.
She hands me the box
covered with her words
written with marker. I should
bend down, offer
the dead to damp earth
but I hesitate, trying to read my daughter’s words.
While her body has bloomed overnight,
her voice has grown rare, painfully
rare. Too dark, I struggle to decipher
the shapes her fingers worked
to form, feeling like I’m reading
someone else’s love
letter. My gaze lingers too long on her writing,
as if I could read my daughter’s heart—this lovely stranger
I raised, this child, this woman who has become,
is becoming, was—the minute she was born, is—the moment,
in the moment, a force that cannot be contained yet must
be, even as she longs for what she hates.
The box’s blue cardboard
lifts her letters away from its surface, makes
them hover, luminescent. After one line
I stop reading. Suddenly, what matters
is that she wrote
across the entire face of the box. Her hand
kept moving. She said it.
Her words glowing in my hands,
I stoop and give them
to the grave. The sound
of dirt hitting
a coffin of any kind
sounds the same.
As my right arm embraces her,
she leans into me.