Jeanine Walker

Wolf

I stepped around the roots of oaks
and sharp small stones, waiting
for my brother in the dark.

We didn’t have a sound. We were
supposed to be quiet. The nighttime
treefrogs clung to the bark and climbed,

cicadas buckled their ribs and hissed,
and as the sounds grew loud and my own
voice stunted I began to imagine

the swish of snakes, their fanged mouths
opened wide to take me. No one came.
No human sounds of twig break

or mud slosh, no hidden sneak
of breathing. Just nighttime,
nighttime and me, the silent waiter,

the lonely wolf. If I couldn’t make a noise
and no one ever came, what would
that say? I didn’t want to know

that thought. I waited to be seen.
I swear the sun came up
with me still there, awake beneath the tree.

Jeanine Walker is the author of The Two of Them Might Outlast Me (Groundhog Poetry Press, 2022) and has been recognized with grants from Artist Trust, Jack Straw Cultural Center, and Wonju, UNESCO City of Literature. Her poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Denver Quarterly, New Ohio Review, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.

Jeanine wrote the following about her poem:

I love the idea that poetry can have elements within it that the speaker herself can't have. Here, the speaker must be quiet, and yet the poem is full of sound play: rhyme and near-rhyme, assonance, alliteration. I wanted the sound to be resonant in order to heighten the silence the child-speaker feels obliged to keep as she waits for what feels like an entire night for someone to find her. The noise inside her is pounding; because it can't come out of her, the poem has to make the sounds.