GAIL MAZUR
Lilacs on Brattle Street
On the brick sidewalk, pale clusters
ofpurple stars, picked carelessly
from nineteenth-century yards
by rootless flirtatious students,
tossed away, darkening, after a briiffling
with nature and the city's literary past .
..
Brattle Street. "Tory Row." This afternoon,
I could almost think nothing's changed–
clouds of May cherry blossoms, pink dogwood,
the mellow blown tulips - so peaceful,
Longfellow himself might be strolling here,
lost in Dante,
nel mezzo del cammin.
.. .
or Margaret Fuller, her father's only son,
breaking from studies in Greek and Latin,
not yet awakened to love, not yet drowned .. .
A small boy tears past me, his arms full
oflavender plunder, Wacs he's bringing home
for his mother. I like his face
on which little but joy is written,
yet I have to invent a darkness in it,
as if, moments ago, he was dragging
his sneakered feet, desperate to forget
what his teacher said, something about Chernobyl.
She'd pointed to it on the roll-down Hammond map.
He was swept for the first time by the question,
What
if
nothing lasts?
I make this innocent boy, this thief,
think my thoughts about nuclear ash
blowing across Kiev, across our ancestors .
I see him in the stunned classroom, terror
that passes when the bell rings, but we know
it will return now, over and over,
the too-bright light, eye-widening
what
if-
