The Only Window on the Ward
POETRY
by Judith Harris
It was a dictionary of sounds,
cars passing, pigeons gargling,
and sirens getting louder and fainter,
a clanging gate or a crow’s
bellicose rasping, almost human.
Rain washing over with the voices
of leaves, glad to have water.
Mornings, I counted the syllables
of the wind rattling the glass,
a carpenter’s hammer to nails,
and waited for the rosin
of sun to coat one of the branches
like a violin’s bow
I only heard with my eyes.
Judith Harris is the author of three collections of poetry: Atonement and The Bad Secret, published by LSU Press in 2000 and 2006, and Night Garden, published by Tiger Bark Press in 2013. She is also the author of two critical books on poetry and psychoanalysis, Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self through Writing, which was published by SUNY Press in 2003, and The Poetry of Loss: Romantic and Contemporary Elegies, published by Routledge in 2023. Harris’s poems have appeared in The Nation, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Hudson Review, North American Review, Image, Alaska Quarterly Review, Literary Matters, Poetry East, Terrain, Ploughshares, Bellevue Review, Slate, Verse Daily, the syndicated newspaper column “American Life in Poetry,” Poetry Foundation’s “Poem of the Day,” and “Poem-A-Day” from the Academy of American Poets.
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