A woman on a bicycle with her child in the basket
rides her way through wartime, passing the miles
murmuring the names of things, cow, horse, tree,
sheep, field, trough, barn, in his ear as they go,
and everything he hears the child sees, the things
he sees becoming everything she says they are,
a world returning to him while he murmurs cow,
horse, tree, to a girl who rides in a basket, as he
bicycles the miles of countryside, in other times.
Read Fort Juniper: A Poets Place by Jessamyn Smyth
Henry Lyman’s work has appeared in The Nation, New England Watershed, The New York Times, Poetry, Talking River, TQ, and other periodicals. He edited Robert Francis’s posthumous collection Late Fire, Late Snow and an anthology of New England poetry, After Frost, and has published two books of translations. For twenty years he hosted Poems to a Listener, a radio series of readings and conversation with poets. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and serves as a trustee of Fort Juniper and an executor of Robert Francis’s literary estate.