The (Barely) Bearable Heaviness of Being - Fall, 2017 by Kathleen Brewin Lewis
-with apologies to Milan Kundera
We sit on the front porch
listening to leaves fall,
she in her fleece bathrobe,
I in my quilted coat.
The cat deposits
a limp sparrow at my feet.
The first frost has crept in
during the night
and killed the coleus,
robbing us of fuchsia
and lime green,
leaving us brown.
To the west,
houses and forests burn.
To the south, rain blows,
waters rise. Coming soon
to a neighborhood near you,
hail of bullets, mushroom cloud.
I’m not sure
who’s in charge here.
All I know is
I am worn with trying
to siphon truth
from air and airwaves,
misleading leaders,
wars of words.
All is not well.
We soldier on.
Kathleen Brewin Lewis is a Georgia writer and avid hiker in the mountains of North Carolina and North Georgia. She's the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Fluent in Rivers and July's Thick Kingdom (FutureCycle Press 2014 & 2015). Her work has appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, The Christian Century, and elsewhere. She won the 2017 First Place Award of Excellence from the Georgia Poetry Society and received the Robert Driscoll Award of Excellence from Reinhardt University.
