Janiculum Hill, Rome
All November, noon didn’t seem like noon:
the light too yellow-gold and pressing long shadows
on the burnished stones of every square. Even morning
felt late in the day, as if I’d already missed too much.
And of course I had—around the city, marble columns
have cracked into boulders as ordinary as umbrella pines.
Roads veer the way they always have. The same starlings
flurry the skies. Along the Forum, a placard read
millenia ago it was common practice to bury the dead
among the living. Babies learning to walk over old bones.
In the botanic garden, moments before twelve o’clock,
the orange cat and a flock of birds scattered in a frenzy.
Up the hill, a blast from a cannon. Rose bushes shuddered;
a door swayed, barely. Was it the animals’ premonition
or just daily routine, a learned history? On cue,
each church bell clanged out over chipped red roofs,
their relentless timekeeping triumphant and tired.
Born and raised along the Mississippi River, Kate Welsh lives in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a BA from Barnard College and an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where she was the Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow in 2021. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and her poems can be found in Grist, Variant Lit, and Arts & Letters, among others. She is the co-founder/co-editor of The Swannanoa Review.
