Yishak Yohannes Yebio

The Year Without Spring

The year the earth forgot to bloom, we buried our hands
 in the thawing dark, fingers pressed to the pulse of nothing.
 No crocus nosing through the frost, no green insisting itself
 into the ruined air. We waited. We named the silence
 something holy.

At the river’s edge, my mother peeled an orange,
let the rind curl into the dirt like an omen.
She said, Eat. Even this is a kind of spring.
But the juice ran red down her wrist,
& I did not tell her.

I walked home past the field where we used to lie,
where we turned our faces toward the sky & called it mercy.
Now, only the wind moves there, unbroken,
unanswered, sweeping its long arms over the grass
like it could pull something back.

In the morning, I found a sparrow in the road,
its body stilled between the yellow lines,
one wing trembling in the wind.

I carried it home, held it beneath the cold light,
waited for some kind of instruction.
Tell me, how do you mourn a thing
that never arrived?

Yishak Yohannes Yebio was the 2024 Youth Poet Laureate of Washington D.C. and the Arts and Social Justice Fellow at the Strathmore Cultural Institute and Wooly Mammoth Theatre Company. He was nationally selected as an intern at the Library of Congress. His writing has been featured on the Nowhere Girl Collective and the Eunoia Review.