poetry

• While at the Fair

  The elephants pass
  through the street like royalty.

  In the long, thick curves
  of their trunks, I see secrets,
  generations and generations
  of stoic acceptance
  wrapped around each nose
  like the rings of a tree.

  You too wear your grief
  this way, in almost-hidden
  lines across your forehead,
  an impenetrable language
  of woven experience,
  your heavy footsteps

  moving always forward.

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