New Orleans Reverie, After Volunteering

Not just your house on Dauphine Street we gut,
but the future,
like Sicilian sweet peas.

Like my sentences, everything here is unfinished.

Will I ever return,
find their fresh-start tendrils, growing,

alongside chartreuse fleur-de-lis between the wrought
iron rails we prime, today, before leaving?

Denise Calvetti Michaels
—for Robert Smith, 72