Morendo
This is not the spot where the plane
plumaged from the sky to carve a cavity in the earth
Nor did I ever hear bagpipes in the Scottish village
notes never hung on the limbs like knots of hard walnuts
Never did birds echo how sweet the sound
and there never were gray skies
gray ghosts threading the fields
never scattered wreckage
nor body bags
This never was a town with ruins for houses
a pattern of death never traced on the Constable's wall
never a list of numbers a bloody shred of passengers
identified by how unrecognizable they were
There never was a knot of bodies flying through the afternoon sky
never a soft plot to bury them in
There were never families kneeling
keening
A son never boarded a plane
nor looked back
A sky never
emptied
a closed casket never
filled
perhaps there never was a hole in our world
Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios' award-winning chapbook, Special Delivery, was published in 2016, and her second, Empty the Ocean with a Thimble by Word Tech Communications. Nominated three times for a pushcart prize, she has poems published in various anthologies and journals including Stories of Music, The Poeming Pigeon, Love Notes from Humanity, The Blue Mountain Review, American Journal of Poetry, The Inflectionist Review, Cumberland River Review, The Feminine Collective, The Ekphrastic Review, The Kentucky Review, Unsplendid, Edison Literary Review, Passager, and NILVX. She is editor of the Writers of the Mendocino Coast Anthology. She is a Professor Emerita from American University and has spent much of her life performing as a singing artist across Europe and the United States.