Year’s End

By Ellen Bryant Voigt b. 1943

The fingers lie in the lap,

separate, lonely, as in the field

the separate blades of grass

shrivel or grow tall.

We sat together in the little room,

the walls blotched with steam,

holding the baby as if the two of us

could breathe for him and were not helpless.

Upstairs, his sister turned in her sleep

as the phone rang—

to have wakened to a child’s cry,

gagged and desperate,

and then repeat that terror when the call

split the quiet house and centered

its dire message:

a child was dead

and his mother so wrung by grief

she stared and stared

at the moon on its black stalk,

the road glistening like wire.

Rubbing the window clear of steam

as a child rubs sleep from its eyes,

and looking past the fence to where

he had plunged the sled up and down the hill,

we could still see the holes his feet made,

a staggered row of graves

extracting darkness from the snow.

When morning brought the new year in,

the fever broke, and fresh snow

bandaged the tracks on the hill.

For a long time we stayed in the room,

listening to him breathe,

like refugees who listen to the sea,

unable to fully rejoice, or fully grieve.

Source: The Forces of Plenty (1983)

Biography

Ellen Bryant Voigt has lived in Vermont for many years; she spent her childhood in rural Virginia, where she grew up on her family’s farm. Her poems traverse the worlds of motherhood, the rural South, family, and music. Her 1995 collection Kyrie: Poems is a book-length sonnet sequence exploring the lives of people affected by the influenza epidemic of 1918–1919. Poet Edward Hirsch wrote of her early book, Claiming Kin (1976), . . .

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