2002 Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize Finalist

Four Short Months       by Jennifer Richter

Tall as men in the Mekong
the eastern saurus crane
lifted its long-necked cry
above the miles of mud
and river and died out
when gunfire shouted back.
By the time I went
the country was quiet
and I walked past piles
of bullet-pocked rubble.
I did not yet have
a child inside, and I walked
past Vietnam’s broken cities
to the beach and its radiant waves
that had washed the war away.

Now that I have in me
my boy, I’m thinking again
of the wreck. In Hue
I walked through walls that gaped
with tank-shaped holes.
He is only strong enough
to flutter inside me, fly a little
as he floats though in four
short months my body
won’t be enough to keep
my son alive. When I walk,
my rocking soothes him
to sleep. When I am still,
he wakes in me, the wings
return like flocks of
miraculous cranes.
My son can hear me
when I sing so I sing
loudly, for us both, of the cranes
glided back into peace
on their black flight feathers,

their blood-red heads the only
wound that stalks the shallows.
My son can also hear
me when I cry. History,
grow wings and pass him by.

Jennifer Richter

Jennifer Richter is a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. She lives in Corvallis. Her poems are published in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Carolina Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, and other national magazines.