Walking the Pinetum, Mid-May 2020

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The new moon can’t bear
to show her face.
On the baseball field
a pair of geese preen
in peace. Coralberry blooms
around the Contemplation
Circle, gifting a quick hello
from a hummingbird among
the conifers. In my headphones:
a score composed for the planets.
My little pigeon-scattering
companion chases the breeze
as we move toward the castle.
His clover-damp mustache
and paws get lost among
tufts of untamed lawn.
How strangely lush
the months-grown grass.
How red the wet underbelly
of an acorn.
Pine-blonde tail
flexes as a squirrel
bows toward a burial.
Behind the ivy
of the stone-tucked transverse, lights
and wails move
west towards home.



Kait Walser is a New York City-based poet and nonprofit copywriter. She holds an M.F.A. from Wilkes University, where she won the 2013 Etruscan Prize. Kait has facilitated workshops, curated, and hosted readings for Union Square Slam and At the Inkwell NYC. She was awarded a 2015 Delaware Highlands Conservancy Artist Residency and a 2020 Brooklyn Poets fellowship. Her work appears online in Poems in the Afterglow, Indolent Books’ 2020 election series, and the print anthology In Absentia: Reflections on the Pandemic (Bicycle Comics, 2020), among others.

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