Blue Bridge by Geraldine Connolly
Praise the good-tempered summer and the red cardinal that jumps like a hot coal off the track. Praise the heavy leaves, heroines of green, frosted with silver. Praise the litter of torn paper, mulch and sticks, the spiny holly, its scarlet land mines.
Praise the black snake that whips and shudders its way across my path and the lane where grandmother and grandfather walked, arms around each other's waists next to such a river, below a blue bridge about to be crossed by a train.
In the last gasp of August, they erase the time it might be now, whispering into the darkness that passed, blue plumes of smoke and cicada, eager and doomed.
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