For Annamarie, again

For Valentine's Day, for shoe box mail boxes and construction paper hearts laced with packaged white doilies, for playgrounds and paste and pianos and parents, for long foal legs and new stiff shoes that clacked and clunked down the tiled hall, for Miss Knerr who showed us a black and white film of A Midsummer Night's Dream in 6th grade, for my friend, whom I met that year, just as we were on the brink of emerging from the cocoon of childhood, with those first tender beings still nestled within ourselves.

For Annamarie, on the Death of Her Husband 

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~ Randal A. Burd, Jr.

“So we grow together
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition…”
—William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

This is for you,
who once took me in
your wide child’s arms,
strawberry wool,
and tea in china cups,
spools of honey,
your little sisters
tumbling
like golden apples
over your bed,
the snowdrops
of your fingertips
on piano keys,
finding silver yearning
of Für Elise, dreams
unfurling from our pillows
like the peach ribbons
of a surprise party
or midsummer picnics
and the plummy pageantry
of Shakespeare’s rhymes
in the rose garden where
we romped and caught
our sleeves on the thorns
of adolescent naïveté.

Now, across a continent,
as your heart gasps
in grief’s cold tunnel
and clusters of friends
offer you tender
apricots of prayer,
may my voice be
a single petal
floating over miles of time
to land like a fingerprint
of sun on your hair,
for my words spring
from a heart that’s one half
of a double cherry
that still grows,
as ever,
next to yours.

This poem was originally published in Sparks of Calliope: A Journal of Poetic Obsesvations.