Zara Raab

Washington, D.C., the National Archives

Squinting from my bench, I see, up high

The window-washers scrubbing clean the face

Our National Archives show the mall. They ply

Their tiny squeegees up and down. Nearby,

A woman on her phone mentions a place

I’m ferried to by memory. I cough

And move away, as if I could deny

An old alarm whose dial I’ll switch to off.

Would that we were judged, the obit penned,

As much by how we love as by our work.

Now glancing up, I see the Lego men,

Sun hot upon their backs. Their wipers arc

Across the glass, here where the past is salved,

Here where the lives of those long dead are shelved.

Zara Raab is a Powow River Poet living north of Boston. Her book is Swimming the Eel, reissued in 2020 in a revised and expanded edition. She occasionally writes reviews of poetry books for New Verse Review and Arts and Religion.