Kim Squirell

What I keep

She names her horses,
and who they will go to,
the four that must be culled
she names twice, her tongue
holding the sound too long.

She brings me gold,
a pearl broach, a silver hare,
each possession has a story,
she lays words in my open palm.

She wants to know
what I will have,
what I will keep alive
but I cannot choose.

When the stories are done,
when the lists are made
we walk out into morning.

Her rare breed birds
pattern the garden,
their brilliant feathers
deafening against the dumb earth.

Kim had this to say about her poem:

In this poem wanted to capture a moment when all sensation seemed to feed into what is happening. When we pay the kind of attention that matches the emotional weight of the exchange. Those times in your life when you experience a situation you’ve only watched from distance through word of mouth, films or reading. We feel we know it, but not from the inside. This is what I love about poetry, how it can take image, story and feeling and wrap them up together. How it can provoke in another a sense of being there and feeling it too.