Sentence for a Friend's Unborn Child

F. Daniel Rzicznek


 

The instant of Keats's death is somewhere
out there, still occurring

just as the moment of birth, for you,
will go on and on, like

the thick snow that fell last night, a Saturday,
closing the churches, and even their emptiness

and the sunlight filling it,
the complaints of shovels

on the walks outside, and the patter of salt
pelting the concrete are things

that will never move on, like the noises
the solar system makes revolving,

keys twisting in locks and the intervals
before and after the doors open happening

for all time, all singulars being inviolable
as well as the chain they create, like the creatures

frozen in Rousseau's "The Hungry Lion
Throws Itself on the Antelope"—

eyes wide as one eats, one dies, and
the rest stare out, suggesting an audience.