February 2025
Bio Note: I am a retired, 35-year English teacher from Georgia. In 2021, I published my first collection of poems, Strange Fire, and in 2024, I published my second book, Come before Winter (Kelsay Books) and was also nominated for a Pushcart. I enjoy morning walks, playing with my two grandsons, and collecting and reading cookbooks.
A Part, a Parcel
—with quote from Mary Oliver
A part, a parcel, a little bit. A slight
breeze converting the sweaty neck
to cool in mid-summer. A whiff
of honeysuckle on the dirt roads
of our childhood, their ditches
minnowing with life in the standing
water. A mother teething her newborn’s
teensy nails to protect his face
from his moving hands and fingers.
And what of a single peach pit
drying on windowsill to be buried and
resurrected? A mustard seed of faith
moving an entire mountain range?
A dust mote in morning’s golden light,
its entire world reminding us
of our limited stay on this planet?
The poet wrote, I don’t want to live
a small life. I think I do.
Heartbreak
—after Frida Kahlo’s Memory (Mexico) 1937
Heartbreak moves with no wind and no water, little light, and not much life.
Heartbreak is a stiff dress on the clothesline, suspended in silence.
At onset, heartbreak feels like one foot on land, one in the sea.
Or heartbreak is like a body with missing parts.
It is heartbreaking to see love in ruins, bleeding out upon the ground.
People die of heartbreak every day, a real physical phenomenon.
A mother’s heart breaks many times before it breaks, another marvel.
Do you think heartbreak is all about the apple? When was heartbreak born?
And if God knows heartbreak, why is He silent when his children’s hearts break?
In heartbreak, night rules, and dawn becomes the mother of all miracles.
Memory is heartbreak’s reservoir, its infection source, its habitat for pain.
White-winged dove and mountain-mist are heartbreak’s colors.
Heartbreak is a joy-stopper, a faith-tester, a filcher of life, a thief.
Where do we go after heartbreak, after the chest has been impaled?
Where do we go after the long wait for transplant, organs failing with every breath?
After the young father gives the nod to the medical team? After a sister’s kiss
goodbye? Where do we go after the nurse adjusts the drips and the beeping
stops? After she straightens the sheets?
Winter Evening in 2024
Tonight, sitting by the fire, flames leap-frogging
over each other, inviting reflection and snatches
of sleep, I glance at you drinking tea and eating
your scrambled egg and see one who has come
through the fire, a little frayed, a tad scorched,
but one who understands grace, who regards both
the heat and the cold with a joy determined,
deliberate, and moth-winged. In this evening’s
shadow at the beginning of yet another health
scare, I take a lesson from you. I bow my head
and whisper a prayer of gratitude for all our years,
for this moment, hallowed, set apart,
its sweet aroma rising like that from the fat
of Levitical sacrifices of old.
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