Somewhere in a field,
your grandfather’s gold watch lay,
perched on blades of grass
over water spilled from the pond
by last week’s rain.

The watch fell from your wrist
as I’d thought it might,
and so warned you
to wear the other one.
“Nobody wears gold watches
to go duck hunting anymore,” I joked.
And you, hurried and annoyed, replied,
“Well, I guess I do.”
And that was that.

Later, you confessed,
when you realized it was gone,
you searched ’til dawn,
the pale beam of your flashlight
sweeping the vast marsh,
and you, in tears of despair,
sure it was gone forever,
returned for one last look
just as a ray of sun
signaled a glint of gold,
and in that shining moment,
though it didn’t last,
you believed in God.

—Previously published in the San Diego Poetry Annual 2016-17 (Garden Oak Press, February 2017); republished here with author’s permission and kind assistance from Garden Oak Press

Gayle O’Key’s

poetry debuted in the San Diego Poetry Annual 2015-16, with the publication of “Another Poem for Teresa.”