Bringing In the Harvest
My Amish grandmother shared her terrible secret —
None of us are meant to last very long.
Her words felt mystical when I was seven,
like she had received a message from God
on the long scroll of the sky when she looked up.
Grandfather simply nodded, gave an extra giddy-up
tug on the horse’s reins, as our buggy clipped-
clopped on the roadside, leading us to
only God knows where.
Grandmother’s words were pulled out
of a deep Well of Knowing,
and I was too young to understand what she meant.
She continued: All we know is that an end is inevitable.
She shook her head as if mistrusting
and answering her own question, her black bonnet
covering her eyes, but I could feel doubt
and adulation mix, shivering tears
like laundry hanging on a line and drying slowly.
She hid her reactions from me
where I could not see them, as if hiding cookies
out of my reach, out of sight, out of mind.
I knew my silent grandfather would not explain
what she meant, why her words bounced
and jolted my spine like buggy springs on asphalt.
I’d have to reason the meaning out for myself.
The horse merely cantered, blinders focused ahead.
Already, neighbors were gathering in a field.
I knew this was important.
I could learn something here.
Grandmother said:
This is what all our futures will look like.
A man in a pine box looked like he was napping.
My grandmother led me to him, guiding my hand.
Insisting: Here, touch death, know we all die.
His hand felt like a cold, hard fence post.
I had butchered chickens for years but this, this
was altogether different. I knew him
from Meetinghouse. He once had a name,
and now, his name would stay behind,
while his body emptied into the vastness of forever.
My grandfather placed his callused hand on my shoulder,
as if to say without words, that it is alright to know death,
that his touch had helped me leave childhood behind
to become a man reckoning with the reality of this world.
Grandmother repeated: None of us are meant to last,
but where we go next will be endless.
*
A Catalog of Mysterious Diseases
My sister keeps creating mysterious diseases.
Some real. Some, not so real. She practices dying.
She began diagnosing herself. It became easy.
She looked between words with a squint,
for diseases with no cures,
to have the perfect staged, romantic death.
She began early with exotic diseases like the plague
or leprosy or poisoned by an Asp.
She practices the dramatic art of dying.
When she burst her appendix, no one believed her.
She walked twenty miles to the nearest hospital.
She almost died, then. She really was disappointed.
I lost track of all her illnesses, both the fake
as well as the real. She spent years practicing dying.
She refined her practice. She practiced in a mirror.
She dreamed about dying alone, bloated, swarmed by flies.
She wanted to be the first to die. I listen to her
as she decides she has Orphan Disease,
because our parents died years ago.
I don’t want to tell her that orphan disease
is another term for a rare disease.
*
Martin Willitts Jr is editor for Comstock Review. He won 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December, 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022; He won the 2025 Silent River Poetry Prize. His 24 full-length collections include Blue Light Award 2019, “The Temporary World”. His recent books are “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” including all 36 color pictures (Shanti Arts Press, 2024); “Martin Willitts Jr, Selected Poems” (FutureCycle Press, 2024). He won the 2025 Silent River Poetry Prize for “One Thousand Origami Paper Cranes Fly Away in Search of Peace”. Forthcoming is “Sounds I Cannot Hear Clearly Anymore Add Up to the Sum of Silence” (Bainbridge Island Press, 2026).
Powerful poems.