The news this morning
said that Ramadi
had fallen to ISIS
and that the president
did not have a plan
to push them back
into the Anbar province
though I have a plan
to walk down to the
beach in silence perhaps
where I will stand
in water the temperature
of
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Recorded for Poem-a-Day, December 30, 2015.
Alternate Self-Portrait
One day
I will drift
into darkness
and know it
perhaps
the way a son
recognizes a mother
after he has returned
from many years
of travel
understanding
the new distance
is neither
beginning nor
end
only stillness
Copyright © 2015 by Dean Rader. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 30, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.
Copyright © 2015 by Dean Rader. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 30, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.

Dean Rader
Dean Rader is the author of Self-Portrait as a Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon Press, 2017) and Landscape Portrait Figure Form (Omnidawn Chapbook Series, 2014). He teaches at the University of San Francisco and lives in San Francisco.