I know you are the marriage of heart and wisdom. I look up to you. I know what they did to your daughters. Some days I lie in the near field and spread my arms and weep. Once many years ago during a lonesome winter I tried in vain to write a poem in your honor. I was terribly earnest and the thing turned out like a nursery rhyme written by Tolstoy but because it was for you I didn’t throw it away. I still have it in a box. There’s nothing wrong with naïveté I tell myself though I don’t admit it out loud. Or I do, but only in the right hour as when I’m tired and bowed down by the injustices and I need something like the first flower I brought home for my mother. We are in fact that simple. I hereby admit I know very little. I prefer to imagine there’s another life to come. Simple. Memory. Rain. Spring.
