Day 281

Where are the fields of strawberries?
Your grandfather’s orange grove?
The olive trees whose shadows
you jumped over, a game 
of trying to keep your feet 
from touching them?
Are they nothing but ash? Does the ash
grow seeds?  Can roots
find their way down
through the savaged land
to generative soil?  Once your shadow
leapt across dry summer grass.
Now you are almost as thin as it is.
You lie as still as you can
to try to keep death from touching
your shadow, sucking
your shadow into itself. You imagine
a strawberry:  sweet.  Ripe.
If you close your eyes you can almost taste it.