This poem is inspired by Herta Müller’s autobiographical short story collection, Nadirs, set in Ceausescu’s communist ruled Romania.
The willow shakes her arms with the wind, Her turbulent limbs a cry that she, too, is violence,
In this cemetery, she bends to rake knuckles deep Into polished stone; she knows we hide more than bone
Under the speckled skin of land over which we tread— Careful with our loud words and with the heavy footprints
She scratches at with nails grown in May, sharpened In January; she sways forward with a desire to shred
This cultivated tranquility, to slash open the ground and uproot These ghosts. For them to grow with their hisses that fly up
And out with the cold, that settle as pinpricks of dew In the grass; she longs for their full hips and curves
To fill the cracks between her sharp bones, for them To snatch the last orange at the supermarket,
Chase with red lips the juice that runs cold against Warm skin, and weave in and out between us
Like they do between the lines of poetry we clutch as a rosary Under her branches, where we shiver against these drops
That prick our skin with whispers of what we killed And then buried with this gentle field,
Its green fronds and the brittle tears Of a willow who weeps only for silence.
Rosa Canales currently lives and writes in Hamburg, Germany. Her work has previously appeared in Rust and Moth, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Lammergeier, The Sigma Tau Delta Review and others. You can find her on twitter at @rosacan9.