War Memorial — Poetry by Susanna Lang

 

Mondamin Street, three or four storefronts
and the red brick library. A hawk

wheels over the grain elevator, wings
outstretched and edged with light,

something small held below its belly

                         ***

and a heron flies up the tracks
as if water ran there, one

of three rivers the town was named for.
There are benches where you can

watch the trains go by

                         ***

and three new stones,
each one comforted by daffodils.

 

~  ~  ~

Susanna Lang’s newest collection of poems, Tracing the Lines, was published in 2013 by the Brick Road Poetry Press.  Her first collection, Even Now, was published in 2008 by The Backwaters Press, and a chapbook, Two by Two, was released in October 2011 from Finishing Line Press.  She has published original poems and essays, and translations from the French, in such journals as Little Star, New Letters, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Green Mountains Review, The Baltimore Review, Kalliope, Southern Poetry Review, World Literature Today, Chicago Review, New Directions, and Jubilat.  Translations include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language, both by Yves Bonnefoy.  She lives in Chicago, where she teaches in the Chicago Public Schools.