When Memory Fails By Trina Gaynon

                                                               When Memory Fails

                                She said, If tomorrow my world were torn in two,
                                Blacked out, dissolved, I think I would remember. . . 
                                                                        “The 5:32,” Phyllis McGinley


Thoughts wake me, beating like hummingbird wings.
I raise the bedroom shade to the last morning star,
The moon waxing. I cannot hold the dark.
Caught up in the cycle of news that flings 
Itself from pandemic to politics,
The New York Times tops my online bookmarks.
One headline can set off a rage of sparks.
Daylight weighs on me, a sack filled with bricks.

Winter offers long nights without relief,
Repeated memes running on hamster wheels.
The present holds me in its thrall, seals 
Off both past and future. That ragged thief
Seeks comfort in my stock of tea and books,
Makes me an accessory to a crook. 

Trina Gaynon’s poems appear in Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California and Mizmor Anthology, also recently in the journals Buddhist Poetry Review, Essential, and 45^th Parallel. Her chapbook An Alphabet of Romance is available from Finishing Line Press. She currently leads a group of poetry readers at the Senior Studies Institute in Portland and participates in the Ars Poetica community.