summersweet

Vivian Ia:

A lamentation of summer solstice, this poem feels into the garish shadow of grief cast by peak sun in the Northern Hemisphere. I wrote a first draft of “summersweet” in the evenings of the sunlight’s waning afterglow.

Summer solstice is as bright as it is bittersweet. It also holds ancestral significance for me. My maternal grandfather was born on the summer solstice of 1917, and my father departed on the summer solstice of 2021. Dates have a way of repeating themselves as portals of entry and exit among blood kin. Such is the rupture in the rhythm of relatedness, its continuity.