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Legacy
Robin Greene

To my adult children,
boys turned men,
I leave ten thousand
words on white paper,
a spade for rough soil,
a clock without hands.

To my husband,
I leave a small stone
to fit his palm, a shadow
at midnight, a placeholder
for my failings.

To my deceased friend Pat
I leave a tin of fallen
tears, collected once
a day for a decade,
and a bottle of vitamin D3
to replace sunshine
in the afterlife.

To my living friends,
I bequeath melting snow,
gull feathers weighted
by beach sand, the remains
of my imperfect
love.

And to myself, I leave
the selfie I couldn’t take,
the portrait of who
I might have been,
but deleted
in a moment
of reproach.

—
Robin Greene is the author of two novels (The Shelf Life of Fire and Augustus: Narrative of a Slave Woman), two volumes of poetry (Memories of Light and Lateral Drift), and two editions of a collection of birthing narratives (Real Birth, Women Share Their Stories). She regularly publishes essays, poems, and stories in magazines and journals, and teaches yoga and writing in North Carolina. Greene is a former English and Writing professor, director of a university writing center, and she is the cofounder of Sandhills Dharma Group, and cofounder, past editor, and current board member of Longleaf Press.

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