by Cammy Thomas
I left the light on for years
and finally one night they came.
I heard the floorboards creak–
scrabbling in the walls, but
I saw nothing. Then just
their outlines, children,
ancient children
of this house, standing
in my dim hallway. They
had sat or slept or played
or been lifted into carriages
that carried them away.
Some had found their music
and loved their own children,
others were sent into exile
on a trek they would not finish.
Still they held on to their
siblings, still they stared
at me expectantly, their eyes,
dark punctuation.
Cammy Thomas’s newest poetry collection, Tremors, came out in 2021. Her first book, Cathedral of Wish, received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. A fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation helped her complete her second, Inscriptions. All are published by Four Way Books. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, and in the anthologies Poems in the Aftermath (2017), and Echoes From Walden (2021). Two poems titled Far Past War are the text for a choral work by her sister, composer Augusta Read Thomas, which premiered at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC in 2022. She lives near Boston.