Latvian Fall

by Kevin McGowan

it’s a place people clatter to in old baltic trains
come to forget the tell-tale heart of the city as colour
fades to sepia. dogs who still remember their lupine
forefathers guard ramshackle homes and hearing
their guttural terms and conditions instead of another
taxi backfiring is a good argument for being alive

gurgling brooks flank autumn roads like moats
around each house crossable by plank bridge
or spring-heeled leap. through a mesh fence
potatoes sit heaped at the door of a root cellar
winter defences harvested by those who yet hold
communion with the earth. it does not seem to me,
a visitor, the stodgy centrepiece of lingering soviet
tastes, but rather a testament to survival
hardworking hands and indomitable spirit

rain bubbles in peat moss, blackening the single-file
boardwalk through the bog, mortar shelling the fox
moth caterpillar traversing a sphagnum labyrinth
on the quest to metamorphosis. to take wing and see
the world anew must be like rubbing shoulders with god