Poem of the Week by Louise Gluck
time moves so fast
Labor Day
It’s a year exactly since my father died.
Last year was hot.
At the funeral, people talked about the weather.
How hot it was for September. How unseasonable.
This year, it’s cold.
There’s just us now, the immediate family.
In the flower beds, shreds of bronze, of copper.
Out front, my sister’s daughter rides her bicycle
the way she did last year,
up and down the sidewalk. What she wants is
to make time pass.
While to the rest of us
a whole lifetime is nothing.
One day, you’re a blond boy with a tooth missing;
the next, an old man gasping for air.
It comes to nothing, really, hardly
a moment on earth.
Not a sentence, but a breath, a caesura.
