Grieving Year

Poetry
Written By Kelly Lenox

I will speak the anguish of my spirit; I will complain
in the bitterness of my soul. —Job 7:11, NRSV

Even the lamentations are different now
     multiplied
polyphonic

The lamentation of fire trucks 
                    mustered from far districts
        counterpoints
the heave and suck of ventilators
                    in worldwide chorus

A lamentation of blackberries
          abundant     sweet
picked during phone-call walks 
with elderly parents—so they exercise, too— 
walking back and forth in their back yard
through lamentations of dying redbud
     rock-hard peaches

Protesters lament police killings
Federal enforcers fire
       less-fatal ammunition
      lob canisters of tear gas
Our sewers embrace 
        lamentations of chemicals
and no one can say how they’ll harm 
    trees, fetuses, scarce salmon
              Whether justice will breathe again

Lamentations of weddings cancelled 
     or masked and moved online
            distant from loved ones

Lamentations of families
       blocked
from collective lamentation
                    They grieve apart

Kelly Lenox

Kelly Lenox has published poetry, prose, and translations in Gargoyle, Hubbub, SWWIM, Split Rock Review, Timberline Review, Cirque and elsewhere in the U.S and abroad. Her debut collection, The Brightest Rock (2017), received honorable mention in the 2018 Brockman-Campbell Book Award. “Grieving Year” is part of the manuscript for her second book, No Other Ground. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, with an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Kelly is editor in chief of the National Institutes of Health's Environmental Factor.(www.kellylenox.com)

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