July 2023
Bio Note: I am a ‘home-schooled’ poet, who has had, for the most part, to rely on reading, the web and informal workshops with friends for the development of my craft. I’m the author of four chapbooks and three full-length collections, my most recent, Everything Turns Into Something Else, was published in 2020 as runner-up for the Grayson Book Prize.
Poppies and Ash
I used to see them on my way home from school as I walked the tracks, crowds of orange poppies springing up as if the wind from rushing trains had sown their seeds. I thought of them as uncultivated―my mother’s word―when I saw their spindly stems and gaudy petals. A neighbor lady told me my family all thought they were superior. And she was right. But on Veterans Day, my father would pin a red paper poppy on the lapel of his blue serge suit, the same way, during Easter week, he would come home with a blur of ash on his forehead. I loved him, then, for the common way he wore these signs like a badge. Like a blessing. It was years before I saw a red poppy, solitary and perfect on the side of a headland trail. They call the red ones corn poppies because they grow in disturbed soil. Like after the sowing of corn or the digging of soldiers’ graves in Flanders Fields. I look for poppies on my walks now. I’ve bought a seed packet with a picture of poppies with just a tinge of yellow brightening the tips of their petals. I’m going to plant them in my front yard and wait for spring when they’ll raise up their unassuming heads, letting my neighbors know, at last, I’m becoming one of them.
If My Mother Had Written Poems
They would have captured the languor
of lost dreams—her specialty—
with a few strokes of the pen.
Her persona a woman with beaten-down hair,
penciled-in-brows raised in baffled surrender,
She would have followed the maxim,
write what you know.
Mostly free verse about small town Ohio,
boys with hearts like fists.
She’d find a metaphor for loneliness
in a lightwell’s captive light,
in lines about how she stood, her shoulders
pressed against her sisters’ shoulders,
all of them staring into the same indifferent lens.
Who even remembers lightwells,
or those black-and-white photos,
the ones that needed darkness to develop,
like girls who hold their changing bodies
under the bedclothes at night?
Yes, she was a romantic and a cynic,
a daylight somnambulist, a curator
of thwarted desires. Someone who knew
every longing can become a sonnet,
every loss an elegy.
©2023 Jeanne Wagner
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