Harriet Brown: "After a Miscarriage"

When spring came I came alive again.

The air was finally gentle

and I breathed deeply of sweet

lilac and hyacinth and some faint

scent I couldn’t find or name.

It wafted through the house

like light, forgotten in our long

winter of darkness. The plums

and cherry trees around the block

were laced with flowerlets

and tiny leaves and made a subtle

dazzling of hope. Not a forgetting

but a softening, as if the harsh

outlines of loss were growing

over now with something like the tender 

grass of spring, its blades a clear 
luminous green, a color from childhood,

from a time before grief and its 

terrible healing makes traitors of us all. 

"After a Miscarriage" by Harriet Brown. Text as published in The Promised Land: Poems (Parallel Press, 2004). Reprinted by permission of the poet.

Art credit: Untitled image by unknown photographer.