Here, A Poem That I Found - Julia Kinney

scratched onto an oak table 

in a wild cabin overgrown with bindweeds: 

To live under the Great Star 

How could one have such greed, 

Such self-pity? 

To have life yet choose death. 

To its withered author, I dare respond: 

Have you seen the mossy-eyed boy, 

the one who lives under the rusty Chrysanthemum Bridge? 

Have you smelled the rotting ground beneath him, the stench seeping from every pore of his bare skeleton? 

Have you heard his heavy wails at the stroke of midnight, delivering the grief of the living throughout the rivers of the world? 

Have you touched those same browning hills, 

the ones he once rolled down in glee? 

You have not tasted, I know this, a life like his, 

or else you would see that Great Star 

burning 

the air until it is too thick to swallow, 

burning 

down upon the dried trees, the blackened robins, 

burning life away 

until all that is left 

is death.