Richard Remembers My Mother Singing

Was it the crane
“Groong” by Father Gomidas?
“O crane, whence have you come?
I heed your call.
“O crane, what word
from our homeland?
“You did not answer,
rising like the wind.
“Fly crane,
further from our land.”
Or was it the song
about the rose,
the one that still unspools
from her cassette?
*
Have you seen the clearcut
to the north of Sandwich Road?
Dead wood is all that’s left.
But the line of the hills beyond,
he says with his Irish lilt,
you can see it now,
and draws his hand through air—
I see the hills I see a bird aloft

–Susan Barba

Susan Barba is the author of two poetry collections, Fair Sun and geode, which was a finalist for the New England Book Awards and the Massachusetts Book Awards. She is the editor of American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide, which won the 2023 American Horticultural Society Book Award. Her poems and prose have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, The New Republic, PN Review, and elsewhere. She works as a senior editor for The New York Review of Books.