It's Still Life

A Tenderness for Lost Things

the old woman with no cat
sweeps the loft.

she hums to broken spectacles,
buttons without coats,
spoons that remember mouths
now gone.

there’s a box of keys
with no ambition left—
just quiet, rusted loyalty
to doors that no longer exist.

she crochets warmth
around fractured teacups.
she stitches silence
into the hem of a baby’s sock
found behind the dresser.

“this,” she tells the ghost-robin,
“is the real work—
not saving, but softening
the forgetting.”

and the robin sings
the saddest tune it knows,
while the old woman nods
and lines each drawer
with the gentlest part of night.