Demain (Tomorrow)

after Folon

Surely trees are reaching for some voice
the winter burglarized.
While they were sleeping

luxuriously in thick green
featherbeds, the wind slid
into their arms, kissed them till they

were shaken,
dark bones clawing for the stars
who speak a language of farewells.

Strip anything
and there's an agony of form
contorting,

desperate to acquire
what only camouflage can proffer
or failing that resist.

If trees do nothing but foreshadow,
if they persist
like war-cripples waving deformed stumps

at the windows of the comfortable,
if they hail a black planet in the dawn sky.
If it hurts to look at this,

don't look,
only keep thinking
one day ahead of yourself.

Joan Colby has published seven books, including The Lonely Hearts Killers, and The Atrocity Book. Her work has appeared in over 850 publications, including Poetry, Atlanta Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, The New York Quarterly, South Dakota Review, and Epoch. She has been awarded two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards and an IAC Literary Fellowship. She received honorable mention in the 2008 James Hearst Poetry Contest and was a finalist for the 2007 GSU (now New South) Poetry Award, the 2009 Nimrod International Pablo Neruda Prize, and the Ernest J. Poetry Prize.