February 2015
My husband and I met on a blind date one weekend I was home visiting during my senior year in college. We adopted our daughter about ten years later (She was born on Thanksgiving Day), and then our beloved dog whose birthday we declared to be the day we brought her home. I am a middle school special education teacher, creativity coach, expressive arts workshop facilitator, and reiki master living in New Jersey. My website is called Poet in You (poetinyou.weebly.com). In the Waiting, my first book, came out this year. My poems have also appeared in a number of journals including Tiferet, US 1, Exit 13, and LIPS, and online in The Music In It: Adele Kenny's Blog.
At Riverside Cemetery
The wind barely breathed that humid,
not overwhelmingly hot Monday morning,
three days after Dad turned eighty.
We drove to Saddle River for a visit,
long overdue.
After several searches down wrong paths,
around graves too far from the road,
too close to the fence, we spotted the stone,
and a flag stuck in the ground
on a finish line no one races to.
Langer, Warfman, Warren —
yards from Maimonides Circle.
I raised my fist in the air,
then tiptoed around the silent souls
to our family gravesite.
Two footstones groomed for company,
under Perpetual Care, their namesakes
neatly carved and discernible.
Four others, dressed in a tangle
of earth and vines.
I bent down in white capris, nails
manicured, diamond glistening on
my finger, and tugged at the ivy claws
that clutched my ancestors’ stones,
while my father protested
Insects scurried across stained names and dates as I brushed off decades of dirt with bare hands.
I wanted my dead to feel the wind’s tickle, the rain’s clarity, the sun’s truth —
despite the circumstances.
—originally published in Exit 13 Magazine
©2015 Wendy Rosenberg