Missing Child
The sound of them woke me in the morning,
feet kicking up careful spirals of leaves
and lean, low voices under my window.
All the way to the woods there’s a line of them,
a missing boy overnight their care won’t solve:
the world is too small to search all of it.
I find one to say about the garden:
my dog died is all, that’s why the hump’s there,
but now outside I feel the evil of it:
while I slept, some lost flight into the trees,
someone’s son crouching silent in the leaves
but taken anyway by the wide awake.