Reconciliation
Barely any sounds or light in the sky
just yet and there’s an uncommon
stillness as if the dull, dark whole
of the world has taken an indrawn
breath while a pregnant moon, in its
slow transit, spills its feeble light
across the brooding hills and the
water and I’m wondering why it is
that I sometimes feel better suited
to the world at an hour such as this
when silence takes hold, and, knowing
how memories become more elusive
as we age, I am somehow able to
more clearly recall those times I lost
what mattered most in this life while
watching days shamble into months
and months into years and you tell
yourself that all that goes missing
happens for a reason and that there’s
a valiant purpose to be found in grief
and anguish until that moment of
quiet retreat gives way to a bird
yearning haplessly to lift itself from
the surface of the water, the rhythmic
knocking of a loosely tethered boat,
the muffled unfurling of a flag
wakened by wind, and the louder
foment of the mid-summer tide
rising and rushing towards shore
and the brazen detritus of the living,
lifting and cleansing the heart
before it slowly settles back to body.
A resident of Connecticut, John Muro has published two volumes of poems — In the Lilac Hour and Pastoral Suite — in 2020 and 2022, respectively. His third book — A Bountiful Silence & Other Poems — will be published later this year. Since 2021, John has been thrice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, twice nominated for the Best of the Net Award and, in 2023, he was a Grantchester Award recipient. His poems have appeared in Acumen, Delmarva, Sky Island, Valparaiso, Willawaw Journal and elsewhere.
(Owing to crossed signals between editors, this poem has also been published in Literary Yard.)
