Again to the market, sun pouring down on stone for the first time in weeks, everyone blinking in the light, strawberries and cherries gleaming in their baskets, white asparagus standing in bundles like holy candles tipped with violet and rose. Miniature potatoes jumbled in their bins, children and dogs underfoot among the shoppers, and the lettuces, elaborate black-red and green rosettes, the priest raising white-draped arms in the dark church—all the things you can no longer see, old friend who would have loved the glistening olives, the odorous cheeses, rose bushes in their pots. Here is all the bounty life had ever promised us, laid out on the tables, the feast we so desired, fragrant in the sun. The old linens, the fat-gorged foie gras, the glowing bottles of rosé, spilling down the hill from the church that celebrates both death and resurrection, but mostly death, the market that celebrates both, but mostly life, and those who are gone now and are going, here, among this overflowing, this largesse, this offering of fruits and flowers, risen from the earth.

Bio: Carolyn Miller