Spelling Bee

 

In the spelling bee my daughter wore a good
brown dress and kept her hands folded.
There were twelve children speaking

into a microphone that was taller than
they were. Each time it was her turn
I could barely look. It wasn't that I wanted

her to win but I hoped she would be
happy with herself. The words were too hard
for me; I would have missed chemical,

thermos, and dessert. Each time she spelled
one correctly my heart became a bird.
She once fluttered so restlessly beneath

my skin and, on the morning of her arrival,
her little red hands held nothing.
Her life since has been a surprise: she can

sew; she can draw; she can read. She hates
raisins but loves science. All the parents
must feel this, watching from the cheap

folding chairs. Somewhere inside them
love took shape and now
it stands at the microphone, spelling.

Faith Shearin, Moving the Piano (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2011)

Sunday Morning Early

 

My daughter and I paddle red kayaks
across the lake. Pulling hard,
we slip through the water.
Far from either shore,
my daughter is a young woman
and suddenly everything is a metaphor
for how short a time we are granted: 

the red boats on the blue black water,
the russet and gold of late summer’s grasses,
the empty sky. We stop and listen to the stillness.
I say, “It’s Sunday, and here we are
in the church of the out of doors,”
then wish I’d kept quiet.  That’s the trick in life—
learning to leave well enough alone.
Our boats drift to where the chirring
of grasshoppers reaches us from the rocky hills.
A clap of thunder.  I want to say something truer
than I love you.  I want my daughter to know that,
through her, I live a life that was closed to me.
I paddle up, lean out, and touch her hand.
I start to speak then stop. 

David Romtvedt, wyomingpublicmedia.org September 13, 2013

First Skating Party

 

Dozens of kids circle
the worn wooden floor
on old rental skates,
and none of them wear
helmets or pads,
so when they collide
or fall or stop themselves
by the simple technique
of steering straight
into the cinder-block barrier,
you can feel the pain
of the parents
who watch from booths
by the concession stand;
they know their children
have bones of balsa
and skin that tears
as easily as a napkin,
but they can do nothing
except yell, Be Careful!
and make hand gestures
to slow down
                             —Slow Down!—
as the ones they love
strobe past them
faster and faster
just beyond their reach.

Joseph Mills, The Miraculous Turning (Press 53, 2014)

Pixie Cut

~ for my daughter

 Black-eyed, black-haired girl of thirty-two,

 I can see you reflected in a mirror

 across the room—one of many mirrors and multiple stylists

 with tattooed limbs and hennaed heads, clipping

 and snipping. And I am thinking that the cloth draped

 around your body, catching the sheared locks that tumble

 to your shoulders, your lap, the floor, seems as sacred

 as white linen on an altar table—your face emerging

 like an angel sculpted from the clay

 of your long, dark hair. You are smiling

 because you see at last, what we all have seen—

 how beautiful you are, that the woman you imagined

 has arrived—

 and she is and always has been, you.

 Terri Kirby Erickson, Broad River Review Vol. 47 (2015)

Safe

 

After we buried my mother, we drank beer

and told stories in the room where she’d died.

The hospital bed was gone and the portable

commode I’d helped her settle on, the love

seat tucked flush with the window again, long

sofa shoved against the wall like always, the same

sofa where she’d fall asleep watching baseball

while she waited for me to come home from

some high-school date, and once, when I wasn’t

home by midnight, she threw a raincoat

over her flannel pajamas and drove around

until she found me mussed and unbuttoned behind

the Big Boy, sharing a bagged can of Colt 45

with the second-string quarterback. All the way

home and for an entire week, I was punished

by silence, a vast black void of disgust. The last time

I saw her, I wanted her to speak to me, to lock

the front door and turn off the last

light, to follow me upstairs, having made

the house safe for the night. But she didn’t

know who I was.

Sara Freligh, thesunmagazine.org (August 2012)

The Sun

 

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone–
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance–
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love–
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed–
or have you too
turned from this world–

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

Mary Oliver, mbsrwestcork.wordpress.com May 30, 2016

Wind Watching

 

What if Dorothy wasn’t afraid of the wind?
What if she welcomed the cyclone?

The thought of being lifted, suspended
in air as release. What if she saw

it as escape, being tossed and jolted? Maybe
a change would occur if she shook fast

enough. Maybe she liked not knowing
if her body would survive the catch and release.

Maybe being picked up and let
go in another’s chaos was freeing.

I imagine she was raptured before the light of the day
had kissed the earth. The swirl approached and she went

willingly. Threw her head and arms back,
and let it consume her.

Maybe she had been waiting to be swept off her feet
by a wild, uncontrollable thing.

Khaline Rae, Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat (Story Line Press, 2021)