Leslie McGrath: Her Dementia

I walk the earth I have forgotten.

I speak a language lost to me.

This wind is cello, this woman cotton.

I walk the earth and have forgotten

which memory’s mine and which is not

and who was she I used to be.

I walk the earth. I have forgotten.

I speak a language. I’m lost to me.

(based on a line by Czeslaw Milosz in his poem “Forget”)

Copyright 2017 Leslie McGrath. First published in Tilt-a-Whirl. Republished by permission of the author.