Flag Day 1968

by Fran O’Farrell

The city grieves for Robert Kennedy–
city that took his life.
The bear flag flies half-staff,

but children bend like birch and will rebound.
I walk home on Beverly Boulevard,
leaving my school for the last time,

the western sky awash with gelt
at four o’clock. I pass ponies
drowsing in their barn–ponies I

am now too old to ride.
(Blaze, my favorite, is retired.)
Small shops prepare to close.

The fountain at Mount Sinai Hospital sends up
a little plume that drops like tears into
a tiled basin. My neighbor’s Tudor house

greets me as I turn onto our street; the paint flakes
from her hitching post, a man in jockey’s clothes who
lifts his hand to take a horse’s reins.

Why can’t I shift the sadness in my heart?
Weltschmerz is in me now,
a companion for all my days.

Kashmir

for Agha Shahid Ali

The Jhelum River makes paisleys
as it moves through the vale.
The waterway houses display
their saffron-colored shawls

and on a houseboat called
Abode of Love a couple waits
for the greengrocer to bring his
shikara to their door.

Tonight guns have fallen silent
on the Line of Control, and stones
once thrown in anger line
the paths of Shalimar.

If you had human form
you would be here to watch
as geldings with curled ears
graze the Fairy Meadows

and islands on Dal Lake
are towed from place to place
until, from the peak of
Nanga Parbat, they look like stars.

Moses

Once you threw your
wand in the sea
and made
a water road

leading us back
to rocky hills
where we made wine
from prickly pears.

You polished with long sleeves
sapphire tablets
until they showed
asterism

and let us rest
in law.

Sylvia at Stonehenge

West through Wiltshire
the monument appeared
and disappeared
as the road rose and fell.

She did not yet know
her world would sink
off Cornwall’s coast
like Lyonnesse.

She should have stayed
in the ring of sarsens
and slept among
the ancient stones.

A Water Burial

his brown eyes turned
to river-polished stones

his high, clear voice
became brook sounds

he came to me that night
with streaming hair

and said he’d swum the Wolf
as far as Loosahatchie Bar

before the current carried him
to God

BIO

Fran O’Farrell is a graduate of UCLA and of the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Fran’s work has appeared in California journals. Fran has worked as a librarian and magazine editor but is now retired and living in Los Angeles.