Walking with My Daughter After a Funeral
When she asks me if trees live a long time,
I tell her longer than a person lives.
She says that she won’t die.
We start to climb
our hill and she brings up the relatives
who wheeled the casket on a squeaky bier:
Am I as strong as them?
Her stroller rocks
as she unclips herself—it’s her last year
for strollers, training cups and safety locks.
Behind the church this morning in raw weather,
she wondered why we don’t know any hymns.
And why, if there’s a Heaven, people cried.
Now, under scudding clouds, her bright face dims.
She asks me if I’ll die. I wish I’d lied
and said I know we’ll always be together.
Brian Brodeur is the author of four poetry books, most recently Some Problems with Autobiography (2023), which won the New Criterion Poetry Prize. Recent poems and literary criticism appear in The Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, and Pushcart Prize XLIX (2025). He lives with his wife and daughter in the Whitewater River Valley.
Praise for the winning sonnet, “Walking with My Daughter After a Funeral”:
“Walking with My Daughter After a Funeral” uses the sonnet form exquisitely to capture the moment when a child’s understanding of death shifts from childlike to something deeper. In the octave, the young daughter’s comprehension is physical—the tree, the squeaky bier—and absolute—she won’t die, her parent is strong. The inverted fourth foot in the first line and the line break after “climb” telegraph the work to come. The turn of the poem occurs when the child gets out of her stroller, stripping away the protections her parent has provided. In the sestet, the daughter asks her parent more metaphysical questions about their own relationship to religion and Heaven, and “her bright face dims” as she starts to understand the finality of death. The poem ends with every parent’s struggle when watching a child learning to deal with grief, wanting to be honest, but wanting, too, to comfort. The narrative thread is clear, and all the rhymes are natural. The sonnet form melds brilliantly with the content in this searing poem.
~ Midge Goldberg, Judge
