Sonnet for the Safe Kept Object

The only lock of hair I have ever mourned
is a silky strand—a baby’s purest blond,
saved from the first cut of a daughter’s hair
& preserved with a photo under glass.
This lock will never darken, never gray,
grow old or coarse, this monument of loss
& family—dead at twenty-one.
The irony! Before an imminent
separation, to offer a lock of hair
was thought to be a sign of consecration.
Once this daughter, unschooled in death’s
finality, found a dead bird in a fir tree
took a feather for prosperity—unaware
of life’s elasticity, restless, in love with destiny—