Every Unreturned Drop Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Pilots drink rum and sing
Sea shanties
And they are passed up by little boys
On their way to never, never land;
And the stewardesses sigh,
Swooning as they remember lost love:
And these words are his,
To an adolescents of vermilion orchards
And spells which would work,
While they play sports beneath us like Salamanders
While the rivers boat:
And oh how I loved who I loved,
And I didn’t even have to finish class to spell her
Name,
To keep it like a fetish under my pillow,
To seep in the wounds of her being, to surrender to
Her at daylight,
And to carry her books for her with whatever hands I
Have left;
And I am the little shepherd boy still tending to the
Sheep up in the mountains,
Weeping into the deeper spells of the lakes she knows that
Will never move;
As she bares children and changes her name and fights
To stop the wrongs of the earth,
These waters still bare her name, but what she does not
Remember is that I have cried every unreturned drop.