Frannie Lindsay

Homecoming
April 24, 2025 Lindsay Frannie

Homecoming

Now the immense loneliness begins.
— from “Onto a Vast Plain” Rainer Maria Rilke (The Book of Hour

 

The birch trees want to be left alone.
Lichen still fashions itself from algae and air;
heaven is only heaven.

 

Each evening comes sooner, bearing
the old beginnings.

 

Come let us find our way
beneath these brittle beams we thought
would guide us,

 

for I have brought us both enough
spent things, and chosen to keep
no record of what we were.

 

 

 

 

Frannie Lindsay’s sixth volume of poetry, The Snow’s Wife was published by Cavankerry Press as part of their Notable Voices Series. Her other titles are If Mercy and Mayweed (The Word Works); Our Vanishing (Red Hen Press); Lamb (Perugia); and Where She Always Was (Utah State University Press). She has held residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Millay Colony. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, and many others, as well as The Best American Poetry and The Plume Anthology of Poetry. She is a past winner of the Missouri Review Prize.