Rebecca Starks: “If This Be the Season”

IF THIS BE THE SEASON

Her mind moves now

from autumn leaves to milk.

The earth turns, too, 

more quickly. Her grown

children come home again.

She slides in all four leaves.

Longest table, shortest day,

fattest tree to trim

and mist each night.

The milk’s left out all week.

When they’ve gone,

she’ll pour the curds

in a vase, setting to soak

the stems of dish-washed

silver until they bloom.

Rebecca Starks has had poems appear in Baltimore Review, Crab Orchard Review, Rattle, Ocean State Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Slice Literary, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of Rattle’s 2018 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor and of Poetry Northwest’s Richard Hugo Prize, and her book of poems, Time Is Always Now, is forthcoming from Able Muse Press. A freelance editor and teacher, she is a former director of the Burlington Writers Workshop and a co-founder of Mud Season Review.

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