Poetry by Mary Ann Honaker

             ​emilykneeter CC



HOLD

Imagine a bucket of clean, clear water.
At night it holds the moon, the archer, the big and little bear.
In daylight, it holds arms of trees 
wrapping themselves around it in an embrace.
At the heart, endless blue, or a gray encroachment of clouds.

Imagine you are the bucket.  When the sun falls down
and nothing wears its usual face, you still
find crumbs and crescents of bright.
There will be times when in the dark all you see
are darker shags of wind-harassed trees,
beating rather than embracing you.
But you hold this too, serenely, with a shimmer.

You will soon feel a tint of rose limning you
on one side, and it will continue to bloom,
until the sky is a bright eye and the trees
friendly again.  It will happen.
It is as inevitable as the second deepening,
purplish in hue, that on the other side of you
proceeds the deep dip into another night.

What if you could just hold it,
whatever it is, the caverns of your being
quiet and clear?  So when one drinks of you,
that person will feel refreshed.


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Mary Ann Honaker is the author of It Will Happen Like This (YesNo Press, 2015) and Becoming Persephone (Third Lung Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Bear Review, Drunk Monkeys, Euphony, Juked, Little Patuxent Review, Rattle.com, Sweet Tree Review, Van Gogh’s Ear, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart prize. Mary Ann holds an MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. She currently lives in Beaver, West Virginia.