No Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
—ELIZABETH BISHOP

You know everything will come to an end:
the sugar, the tea, the dried sage,
the water.
Just go to the market and restock.

Even your shadow will abandon you
when there is no light.
So just keep things that require only you:
the book of poems that only you can decipher,
the blank map of a country
whose cities and villages only you can recognize.

I’ve personally lost three friends to war,
a city to darkness, and a language to fear.
This was not easy to survive,
but survival proved necessary to master.
But of all things,
losing the only photo of my grandfather
under the rubble of my house
was a real disaster.