Lunchbox Poems

Because loneliness and beauty are inseparable, one is often

mistaken for the other. As when it becomes difficult to eat

because the tears won’t stop coming though you’re hungry

and the food, undoubtedly, delicious: the peas, tomatoes,

pink slice of lamb and small round dollop of white beans.

Beauty and loneliness are there in the girl you remember

seated on a bench beside the river waiting for the boy

who will kiss you as he pushes his ice-cream into your face.

They are the chainsaws scattered like orange poker chips

while the work crew takes their break beneath the last cedar,

huddled and begging its shade. Think of your recurring dream

where the bodies of the newly dead turn to diamonds

spread across the ground like tiny failed planets fallen

from the sky and then try to tell me what I say isn’t true.

KEETJE KUIPERS