Time when
the woman pauses her needle and stares
before her. Silently she comes to know
a man she loved in sudden years gone by
has dead. From him she learned the many
thousands ways the world is not.
Strange, how the power of memory
increases when objects of its longing
are taken away, strange, that the woman
has no power to weep.
For half an hour she sits alone,
examining the shapeless silence with its
dark message, and then she pats her
sewing by and rises to address new
ceremonies of her altered life, to bear
her sorrow gracefully, as a tree bears
snow
