BURNISHED
for Eddie
The art house is playing a documentary
on the war in Vietnam—as if I needed
to be reminded. I’ll let the ghosts
have peace today. I walk across the park,
the entire grounds and the people
burnished by the sunlight. I even decide
to stroll along the river, and I admit it—
thinking of the waterlilies in the Mekong.
*
Tim Suermondt’s sixth full-length book of poems A Doughnut And The Great Beauty Of The World came out in 2023 from MadHat Press. He has published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Stand Magazine, Smartish Pace, Barrow Street, Poet Lore and Plume, among many others. He lives in Cambridge (MA) with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.
