Three kinds of sudden equal three
       

Three kinds of sudden equal three
windows in a second-story room.
And birds oblivious out there, the way
we borrow something and forget

the kindness, the loss at the other end.
Birds do not suffer. I say that so lightly.
How can you think such a thing?
every mother cries out to me, mother

cloud, mother sideways and thunder,
mother cut with a knife not swiftly,
not clean. Day of almost rain, almost
whoever it was, which of us,

as children. Hidden. Pressed forward
and back. Remote, the urgent
start of it as a door locking distant,
the hinge shuddering up here.

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Copyright © 2012 Marianne Boruch All rights reserved
from Columbia Poetry Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission