Solitudine

It is time to bury the daffodils again.
I will nestle their spent bulbs into the earth.
I will adorn them with sprinkles of wildflowers
from the seed-filled Easter eggs your mother gave us
before you left.

The only thing I know how to draw is two
purple mountains with a sun in between

                          After Neil Shepard’s Vermont poems

I’ve been so far down a dirt road,
I forgot what shoes I own.

Black spruce wind
thinning my skin cell walls
into age. Chickadees pecking at snow,
chickadees pecking my cogs into powder
until they become snow,
until I become snow, and there is
nothing
for it,
is there?

But to wait for a melting
and a sign.

About the author

Anna Riley-Shepard is an American-born performer, multimedia artist, cognitive neuroscientist, and queer ecologist based in Amsterdam. They work across cultural, academic, corporate, and non-profit sectors. Their projects address our society’s relational breakdown with nature, each other, and ourselves. Their poetry emerges in (imagined) dialogue with those in whose footsteps they follow — especially their father, poet Neil Shepard. 

Photos by Jack Blueberry on Unsplash and gretta vosper on Unsplash.