Orchard
(for AJK.)
In mid-July I find myself without
a word, while trying as it is to break
into your poem, walk the human route
to joy, the one unshamed of both its ache
to free itself from underneath the stout
and very heavy Budai statue fake,
as well as its uncompromising bouts
of sadness. Surely as you hold mistakes,
as confident as I am that they count,
to be an orchard: fruit that failures make,
without suggesting you or I would doubt
the way that someone's soul who fails could take
a life, or many lives, to heal, whose fount
is full of tears, for whose returning sake
we pray. In mid-July I find this out
about the woman calling when I wake.