Remains

This poem appears in the Fall 2019 issue of Modern Age. To subscribe now, go here.

In our garage, your hockey skates still dangle.
Green and yellow parakeets still call
From your painting on my office wall,
Bright birds slowly dimming on a tangle
Of brown, twigless branches. A singing bowl,
A book of Dylan’s lyrics, a leather journal
Whose stiffening leaves I turn to read each kernel
Of tunes (the jigsaw pieces of your soul),
The Warwick bass you paid for by yourself,
Three joints you rolled that I will never smoke,
A New Year’s gift you gave me as a joke,
And you—now dust and ash—rest on my shelf.
Watercolors fade. Ashes scatter,
But love remains—firm, unchanging matter.

Founded in 1957 by the great Russell Kirk, Modern Age is the forum for stimulating debate and discussion of the most important ideas of concern to conservatives of all stripes. It plays a vital role in these contentious, confusing times by applying timeless principles to the specific conditions and crises of our age—to what Kirk, in the inaugural issue, called “the great moral and social and political and economic and literary questions of the hour.”