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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carl Adamshick
Carl Adamshick
Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1969 Carl Adamshick grew up primarily in Harvard, Illinois...
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FURTHER READING
Poems about Loss
Affirmation
by Donald Hall
Ashes
by Paula Meehan
Burning the Old Year
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Catastrophe Theory III
by Mary Jo Bang
Challenger
by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
from Projection
by Lidija Dimkovska
Haunted
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Heavy Summer Rain
by Jane Kenyon
I Found Her Out There
by Thomas Hardy
I'll Try to Tell You What I Know
by Martha Serpas
please advise stop [I was dragging a ladder slowly over stones stop]
by Rusty Morrison
Room in Antwerp
by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
Some People
by Wislawa Szymborska
Song ["When I am dead, my dearest"]
by Christina Rossetti
the lost baby poem
by Lucille Clifton
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Loss

 
by Carl Adamshick

It is nice to be without answers
at the end of summer.
Wind lifting leaves from branches.

The moment laid down like something
in childhood and forgotten, until later,
when stumbled upon, we think:
this is where it was lost.

The sadness isn't their sadness.
The sadness is the way

they will never unpack the rucksack
of happiness again.

They'll never surface as divers rising
through leagues of joy, through sun
willowing through the bottom half of waves.

They'll never surface again.
Again and again,

they will never surface.
About this poem:

"'Loss' came out of a collaboration with Andy Buck. He carved these three-and-a-half inch figures out of wood and applied milk-paint for their clothes. The figures seemed to me somber and I was to give them a voice and narrative. I named each figure, and each figure spoke to something missing. This is number nine in a series of twenty-three. His name is Thomas."

—Carl Adamshick






Copyright © 2013 by Carl Adamshick. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on July 10, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
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