Past the Millennium

Trent Busch

Nothing has come around the house
this morning I wasn’t expecting,
the wren’s quick song a false alarm;

still, winter’s first snow on the lawn
quite surprises me, and I recall Hardy’s
thrush announcing a new century.

To think it over a hundred years
ago he leaned upon his thicket gate
in woe far different from our own.

Could I, I would say to him, now
fully targeted as his Tennyson,
We still look up and give a start—

if sometimes from the fifteenth floor
on tubes you wouldn’t understand—
at the moon’s full gaze upon our art.

And add, could he listen, the bird’s song
I heard today still sounds its promise;
the century’s gate’s as it was then.

Trent Busch, a native of rural West Virginia, now lives in Georgia where he writes and makes furniture. His first book of poetry, not one bit of this is your fault, was published by Cyberwit in 2019. His poems have appeared in many journals including The Best American Poetry, Poetry, The Nation, Threepenny Review, North American Review, Chicago Review, Southern Review, Georgia Review, New England Review, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Northwest Review, Kenyon Review, American Scholar, Shenandoah, and more recently Notre Dame Review, Evansville Review, Agni Online, Boston Review, Natural Bridge, Sou’wester, Poetry Daily, and Hudson Review. Also his poem “Edges of Roads” was the 2016 First Place winner of the Margaret Reid Poetry Prize, Published by Winning Writers.