July 2018
While my three children were young, I wrote just enough poetry to give me an inkling that I might have an aptitude for it, but I wasn’t brave enough to throw my earning potential aside until my family was grown and I’d worked for a number of years. As time went on, I came to regret not having devoted myself to writing much earlier in life. The “now or never” decision came about 20 years ago—my late-in-life career—and the process of creating a poem still gives me enormous satisfaction. I’m gratified that my poetry is widely published in the small press and equally gratified by becoming part of a larger community of writers.
On Shore
My attention shifts from the jungles of Burma
to the Jersey shore, fiction less compelling
than my grandson flinging himself repeatedly
into the surf. We watch the waves wash
over him, my daughter stationed at the water’s
edge and I, settled under an umbrella
further back, her second pair of eyes.
His brother, off to one side, digs for crabs
and holds them captive in sand-filled buckets,
attracting a clutch of curious children.
Since the younger of the two first toddled
over the dunes and clapped his eyes upon the ocean—
with the demur “me too wittle”—we make this
a yearly excursion. Having been to the shore
only once as a child, I take inordinate pleasure
in family vacations, a luxury denied my forebears,
and think of what they endured to get us here—
great-grandmother a victim of the conflagration
that consumed European Jewry, grandmother a refugee
at fifteen, parents casualties of the Depression.
My reverie is interrupted when the boys, shivering
and hungry, announce they are ready for lunch.
We wrap them in towels and unpack a picnic
of fruit and sandwiches. Darlings of privilege—
how much they can take for granted!
Great-grandmother, who saved two of her three
children by sending them away—never to see
them again—to life, to the promise of streets
paved with gold, and untold generations
who came before: we have landed safely.
—first published in Atlanta Review
On Shore
My attention shifts from the jungles of Burma
to the Jersey shore, fiction less compelling
than my grandson flinging himself repeatedly
into the surf. We watch the waves wash
over him, my daughter stationed at the water’s
edge and I, settled under an umbrella
further back, her second pair of eyes.
His brother, off to one side, digs for crabs
and holds them captive in sand-filled buckets,
attracting a clutch of curious children.
Since the younger of the two first toddled
over the dunes and clapped his eyes upon the ocean—
with the demur “me too wittle”—we make this
a yearly excursion. Having been to the shore
only once as a child, I take inordinate pleasure
in family vacations, a luxury denied my forebears,
and think of what they endured to get us here—
great-grandmother a victim of the conflagration
that consumed European Jewry, grandmother a refugee
at fifteen, parents casualties of the Depression.
My reverie is interrupted when the boys, shivering
and hungry, announce they are ready for lunch.
We wrap them in towels and unpack a picnic
of fruit and sandwiches. Darlings of privilege—
how much they can take for granted!
Great-grandmother, who saved two of her three
children by sending them away—never to see
them again—to life, to the promise of streets
paved with gold, and untold generations
who came before: we have landed safely.
—first published in Atlanta Review
© 2018 Linda M. Fischer
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