Today we kick off a week of poetry. Don’t miss a day.
by David Cazden
Once the sun kissed you
to a blush-red shade.
Now a doctor
covers incisions
with balms and gauze, soft
as the haze over broken roofs
and crooked trees
of our neighborhood.
Perhaps you remember–
we crept on the lawn
past mushrooms throwing
spores fine as stars.
Similarly, I release
prayers to your bed,
but you’re still as sculpture
buried in pillows and sheets,
tucked like a passage
in a hymnal.
We’re still entangled
where honeysuckle winds
on weathered fences
gutters sip rain
and pine needles drift
from the eaves.
Perhaps we never left —
morning glories climb
the garden lattice, clinging
tight as shirts over ribs.
And perhaps the neighborhood waits
for our steps, a few blocks
from the hospital
where familiar clouds build,
disperse, build again.
Growing up, the seasons
gathered this way, turning to rain
in your gray eyes.
About the photographer: Originally from Missouri, Sherry Morris writes prize-winning fiction from a farm in the Scottish Highlands where she pets cows, watches clouds and dabbles in photography. She reads for the wonderfully wacky Taco Bell Quarterly and her first published story was about her Peace Corps experience in 1990s Ukraine. Her work has appeared with Longleaf Review, Fictive Dream, Molotov Cocktail and Barren literary magazines, among others. Visit www.uksherka.com for more of her published work. Find her on twitter @Uksherka.
I love this wonderful poem; it speaks to me on so many levels. I am saving it in my file of special works that show me what poetry is able to do.Thank you for this!
Thank you so much for reading, that means a lot to me.