Sarah Brown Weitzman
LOOKING BACK
I meant to return
long before this
but in looking back
we learn too much
of loss.
I dreaded that.
Now going through the house
and my parents’ lives
too revealed
by what they saved
what they left behind
for me to find
I feel nothing
but pain for the past
trying to separate
like old clothes
crumbling in a chest
what does not last
from what I can keep
trying to understand
how I fell
so short of what I intended
to do with my life.
How life twists and turns
against us. How a childhood
is not really understood
until it is lived
a second time
in memory.
How wonderful
and how terrible
it seems now
because it is gone
and because it was mine.
—from Rattle #14, Summer 1999
