May 2017
Here are two poems that deal with freedom in a personal way. These days children seem to be granted so little freedom; their lives are so relentlessly supervised. I remember what it was like to walk to school by myself in the rain, and the way my umbrella formed a private room where I navigated the elements. It was somehow empowering, and the ritual of buying the umbrella in August was always pretty special; filled with the anticipation of the new school year, and the acknowledgement that there would be cold and rainy days. The second poem recounts a true experience I had with my mother. We are not the types to do interpretive dance in nature, but the professional dancers won us over. In the end, there was a sort of freedom in breaking out of our introverted shells to become part of something larger.
There Was This Original Me
The original me
on a September morning
pushed my feet
into red rain boots
each with a single red button.
I opened my new umbrella
for the long walk to school,
alone and complete in the cold
pelt of raindrops.
Gray rivers gushed along gutters
I navigated.
A thin silver stem
rose from the hooked handle
to unfold into a complicated
metal frame, delicate
and elegant as an Eiffel Tower
I could hold in one hand.
A silken dome
stretched wide as the sky overhead.
Its opulent color
drenched down and around me,
backlit by gossamer sun
I had chosen the design
at a store
with my mother.
We opened it once
in sacred ceremony
on a glaring August day.
First published in Blue Heron Review
Dance of the Pigeon River
My mother and I turned up
at Maywood nature center
with its lofty room and plate glass window
overlooking wild grasses
for a program called “Moving Field Guide”
led by a dance troupe from Maryland
we were outnumbered
of the twelve present
seven were dancers
and the program turned out to be
“choreographing nature into our lives”
my mother almost left over it
but the dancers would not be denied
we stumbled down the steep slope
to the Pigeon River
gliding its late April silver
as though it were the pool of Narcissus
but with eddies of booze
and nervous breakdown
my mother and I crouch and twirl
rising together from chill mud to sky
and, as if we were artists,
thumb for perspective on the sun
© 2017 Sylvia Cavanaugh
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