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Joan I. Siegel

 

January Thaw

This winter sunshine loosens time.
I shut my eyes and let it be
the park, the boy from nursery school.
Inside the earth our fingers dig
where earth is chill and all around
the sun soaks through our woolen coats
and on our mud-slick hands. We are
the smell of mud and sun and worms.
Impatiently we pull them up
to curl the air and whip the ground
and crisp our upturned palms. When they
twist back inside the dark, the sun
rolls down and with it fifty years
contract and stiffen, stern as bone.

 

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Bio: Joan I. Siegel’s poetry has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, Commonweal, Prairie
Schooner, Witness, The Gettysburg Review
among other journals and anthologies. Recipient of the New
Letters Poetry Prize
and the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award, she co-authored Peach Girl: Poems for a
Chinese Daughter
(Grayson Books).
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