Elegy, with Sorghum Amplum

I keep remembering
that you are dead.

I remember
the sorghum fields, the fissures
in the earth running through them, running
to catch ourselves on the wire fences.
If you wrap your hands
around the barbs slow enough,
you don’t break the skin

I remember you, lying on your back in
the dead grass, the blades of it
sticking, brown and flyweight, to your shirt;
a girl pouring milk into your eyes
because you’d burned them
staring too long at the sun. Milk,
filling the hollows of your orbits,
and drying on your cheeks; milk
rolling down over your temples
and into your hair like tears.

I wonder if they found my clothes in the harvest.

I wonder if your eyes look like that now,
white and glazed.


Madeleine Dale (Queensland)