Poems By Chris Agee

Poem By Chris Agee

Summer Plums

In the valley before Srebrenica the corn was the tallest
I’ve ever seen. Someone was reaping by sickle
what looked like lavender. Another was scything silage.
Several places, women in kerchiefs and pantaloons
were sat on grass before their houses, looking out.
Low steep hills ringed the valley

with thick woods. There were domed Bosnian
haystacks pinnacled with poles and shells of ruined houses colonized by undergrowth. It seemed right to return to renew fields and gardens amid beckoning ghosts of family and neighbours. A cow was led
on a rope by an old woman in the same dress
and a girl in shorts walked the road
to Potocari. A windfall of apples was
down in an orchard and silken plums scattered
on a forested lane. Two headstones stood
in a cornfield like a summer host
of thousands of splendid ears.

Poem by Chris Agee

Dalmatian Light

Under the bench
now weathered with the last
vestiges of varnish
like fresh grief seared to permanent bone:

three cracks on a limesstone flag,
tufts of dried grass, an ant scampering on its own
shadow, silence cupped
from soughs of sea-wind gusting-

and the same late light
stilled and honeyed
in a corner of the coffin-room
on the afternoon of your wake-night.