Low-moan whimpering from a neighbor’s dog
seeps into my waking mind. All day I hear everything
through its tone, wondering what I should grieve.

What remains when what we’re pursuing loses
the meaning it used to mean? Assured or not,
dead are born each hour, sifted out of their lives.

It may be we’ve lived a long while on barren land,
believing otherwise. The one cradling abundance
is the hardest to convince of the depths of his lack.

I was taught as a child to pray. Signs were found
in the slightest rustle of leaves. I live next to a hill.
Of course each morning I look up and think “Golgotha.”

A beech tree struck by lightning holds its ground
for twenty years. Callus grows on its roots. Nuthatches
nest. The next generation’s children carve on its trunk.

Jeff Hardin is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Watermark, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, and No Other Kind of World. His work has been honored with the Nicholas Roerich Prize, the Donald Justice Prize, and the X. J. Kennedy Prize. Recent and forthcoming poems appear in The Laurel Review, Bennington Review, Image, Swing, 2River Review, and elsewhere. He lives and teaches in TN.