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11 May 2022

The NS Poem: Limehill

A new poem by Nicholas Friedman.

By Nicholas Friedman

A single, elliptic leaf,
trout lilies breaching
the moldered foliage
of ironwoods.

Our son crouches,
finds a world of miniatures
roiling the dirt.
A connoisseur of worms,
he classifies them as still alive
or poor guy.

Today, he adds a vector
to their demise:
He’s going away precedes He’s gone.

It’s happening in him, then—
the long dawn
of that most basic thought,
always arriving.

The hemlocks waver;
mist clots to rain.
The woody rot is fruit-sweet
in a lifting wind.

As I lead him in,
the mortgaged lawn
seethes beneath our feet.

Nicholas Friedman is a poet based in Syracuse, New York. His first collection, “Petty Theft”, won the New Criterion Poetry Prize

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This article appears in the 11 May 2022 issue of the New Statesman, Stalling Starmer