What Remains
By Erich von Hungen
Life has used me.
It sucked the sweet,
chewed down to the core.
It wants to spit
that last little bit—
throw out the pit.
Life is finished
with me.
It shakes the tree of me,
freezes the last fruit,
steals the shine.
Yet something holds—
a quiet, unreasonable force,
the glue in the stem.
Nothing is smooth,
yet something stays.
Life, with all its hunger,
still wonders
how jasmine blooms
without light,
how scent keeps rising
through the dark.
It is the thought of next—
the sun cracking open
its shell of night.
It is remembering,
its own strange meaning—
curiosity clinging
to the last ugly leaves
of a tired tree.
It keeps the eyes open
to whatever comes.
Even the dark
has its glimmer—
a brightness with no source,
arriving for no reason
except that it does.
Erich von Hungen
Erich von Hungen is a writer from San Francisco, California. His writing has appeared in Icefloe Press, The Write Launch, Dust Poetry Magazine, Green Ink Press, The Hyacinth Review, Fahmidan Journal, Apricot Press and others. He is the author of four poetry books. The most recent is “Bleeding Through: 72 Poems of Man in Nature”.
Photo credit: Malsha Ranaweera
Apricot Press 