Elegy
       

Leather like my shoe, this
rat but flat, paper-thin
this had-been rat I'd pass
on wooded path from car
to gym. Always there,
for weeks, never moved
until one day was gone,
blown, swept, brushed,
turned to dust, I don't
know, I only know it once
was a rat—I could tell
from the strand of small bones
it once swung as a tail. Hail
to the dead, to my faithful,
flattened star, to the life
whose life for me began
when it had ceased.

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Copyright © 2013 Cintia Santana All rights reserved
from Pleiades
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission