January 2024
Bio Note: I'm a poet, filmmaker, blogger, photographer, hiker, cyclist, long-distance swimmer, nordic skier and haphazard gardener. My poems have been widely published, including in my collections Signs of Marriage and Intimacy with the Wind. My poem, “Pat Schroeder Was Our Mother,” won the 2023 New England Poetry Club E.E. Cummings Prize.
Who Cares? Broken Ice Means I'm Alive
Even under a thick blanket of gray the temperature is quite warm today for February. Cardinals scavenge last summer’s seeds. Last night it rained enough for sound. The steady plunk, plunk tapped against the roof—wet enough to drench the snow-bound fields I walk with measured gentleness before each plodding step to test the ice to see if it’s solid, slush, or skim that would crush underfoot— cautiously I tap, tap, tap and step onto the frozen terrain hope I won’t crash but when I do a starburst of ice with river running through—my wet shoe soaked in cold emerges defiant, caution eschewed.
January Mud
Rain after many days of warm, we should have known the would-be frozen trails would be thick in mud. We chose one we hadn’t been on before—was it the lake that drew us there, the faint line of the B & M on a map? Dense with bramble, hard to travel, we rode our bikes down that narrow trail, freewheeling with the perseverance to celebrate life, until I found myself spilling into the mud as my tire began its slide—a cartoon slow motion slip— the kind that happens right after your father dies.
©2024 Carla Schwartz
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