The Mulberry Branch
This branch, now low enough to touch, in leaf,
come winter will sway out of reach above.
This simple fact makes no call on belief,
or, if it does, come out, reach up a glove
in January, see if you can reach
a single twig you touched here in July.
But neither of us came to hear, or preach.
The weather beckoned us; the cloudless sky,
the breeze that nudged us to the riverside
to walk awhile in sun and dappled shade.
Here where the river bends and stretches wide
and shallow, you might see a heron wade,
then, seeming not to notice you, to rise,
blue blending blue into its blue disguise.
Dan Campion’s poems have appeared previously in Amethyst Review. He is the author of A Playbill for Sunset (Ice Cube Press, 2022), The Mirror Test (MadHat Press, 2024), and the monograph Peter De Vries and Surrealism (Bucknell University Press, 1995). He is a coeditor of the anthology Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow! Press, 1981; 2nd ed. 1998; 3rd ed. 2019). His poetry has appeared in Able Muse, Light, Measure, Poetry, Rolling Stone, Shenandoah, THINK, and many other journals.
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