Join The Dillydoun Review in celebrating National Poetry Month with

A Poem by Orey Wilson Dayne

It rises like a shark fin
from the coughing soil
in my lost backyard.

I look around, over each shoulder.
No neighbors to peer through windows.
Dry grass scratching beneath my shoes.

Just a stump now,

the rest had been cut away.
Clean bites of a chainsaw gleam,
from sometime before the end.

Maybe someone would’ve eaten
from it now, instead of watching
the sickly fruit pile on the ground

to rot like I used to.

Those absent branches hold
no answers, no direction,
they point me nowhere.

So, I lie down with it for a moment,
resting my limbs on forlorn roots
and, looking up, feast upon the sky’s song,

an aubade I haven’t yet named.

Orey Wilson Dayne was born and raised in Nevada, Ohio. He earned his bachelor’s degree in English at Otterbein University. He received his MFA in Creative Writing at Rosemont College in Philadelphia. He resides in Columbus, Ohio where he hangs out in his hammock, drinks whiskey, and leads tabletop RPGs.