Singing at the funeral of a thirty-one-year-old stranger

slow with the communion Alleluia
like I've forgotten even at the grave
we make our song

we bending to the pews
feel the organ quiver in the wood
the wrinkled grain impressing us with age

they remember how the boy walked the fence rail
as his mother watched unbreathing, how he
leaped down running, wild to reassure

how he, insistent, called himself a crowd for all adventures
making good every swift, unearthly choice
like going into water in the dark

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Libby Maxey is a senior editor with Literary Mama. She has reviewed poetry for The Mom Egg Review and Solstice, and her own poems have appeared in Crannóg, Emrys, Pinyon, Pirene’s Fountain, and elsewhere. Her first collection, Kairos, won the 2018 Finishing Line Press New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition. Her nonliterary activities include singing classical repertoire and mothering two sons.