The Moya View

Tag: regret

  • I Should Have Followed You

    I Should Have Followed You

    I Should Have Followed You “Can I still call you Dorothea?”—even though the black and white lines in the paper reduce you to the habit you wore, arrange you into silence, a name and surname surrendered to the cloistering of lilies. Somewhere beyond this obituary, the grown children you once taught trace grief into their…

  • Answers to the questions you always wanted to ask the departed:

    Answers to the questions you always wanted to ask the departed:

    Answers to the questions you always wanted to ask the departed:(A counter poem with answers after Ellen Bass Inquest)https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/inquest-ellen-bass-poemShe loved apricots, not figs. Olives reminded her of saltwater, and the yellow irises—those were never hers. Her feet stayed clean because she refused to walk barefoot, never trusted the ground, never trusted much at all. She…

  • Wrack Line

    Wrack Line

    I stay behind the wrack line, alone and ancient,only knowing the stillness my wounded feet allow. A Laughing Gull is revering the border left by the tide.Pass, the mate, thumbs its long bill through the leavings:dried kelp stripped of Brittle Stars, bottle caps, broken glass becoming now fine and deadly sand, mangrove twigs, unstraightened, eaten…

  • The Night Is a Triptych

    The Night Is a Triptych

    You sit invisible in the green chair of the diner not enough lightto cast a shadowthe dinner is tastelessyou think you have Covid on the way back to the car your footsteps sink into the blacktopgetting lost in the yellow overheadsthe strippings belowYou trip, stumblefind the carstruggle with the keysthe opening the closing all the…

  • Father, Sin and Holy Ghost

    Father, Sin and Holy Ghost

    I squatter in the catacombs of remembrance. grinding my bones with pumice and chalk for a fine bone dust to clean the vellum bindings of my soul’s revisions.  The scars glitter the ground.   All the others with almost identical names, are around me, enough alike to make me doubt the date I was born.   Something…

  • My Mother’s Sounds

    My Mother’s Sounds

    I am not your dying son, I thought, as my wife gave me the diagnosis, remembering my mom in her dying chair.   I will not pass into final memories watching the Pope in America. “Bless me, Papa”, will not be my last words.   I do not believe in my mother’s God though He…