Yesterday’s Sunset
By Melissa Sorgi

 

I walked along a fog-bound beach last night,
Watched the sun drown in the shadowy dusk,
Heard the siren-song of a thousand mourning gulls,
Breathed deep the wet, green pine-woods air,
And thought about beginnings, endings, islands, and you.

 

Summer is almost over,
Young maples, impatient for sleep, already have flamed and dropped;
The passed over blueberries are growing black and hard in the bushes.
In a few days I’ll board two planes
And land eleven states away where instead of forests
They have swamps and a long, empty highway stretching west.

 

Please be there when I come home
Or yesterday’s sunset which I spend remembering your hands
Will be a summer hour wasted
And fall will last a year.

 

Sometimes

Sometimes,
when for a moment,
a brief, tranquil moment,
your words and my trust
flicker and merge like voices
and I know,
with the education of loss,
that what you say
and what you feel
are what I see,
then for a sometime,
a sometime like the first breath of summer,
I believe without wonder
that you love me
and turn back,
for an instant,
fears from the past.

 

Melissa Sorgi from US has written poetry since college. She works at the National Sexual Violence Resource Center cataloging material for the library.