3/28/2023 Poetry By Stephanie K. Merrill Thomas Wensing CC
The Great White Heron stands to the nth power begging me to pay tribute to the duendes dancing her feet wet with the baptism of shallow water sparkling in the arroyo offering her holy white to the world me wanting to rest in the eloquent silence of the morning blessing the largeness of this present tense so staggering. I remember packing my baggage to get to my mother in time for her dying the suitcase so heavy I knew I would have to rely on the kindness of strangers to help lift it into the overhead bins of the airplane. I missed you and isn’t it something how Mother you are still right here and I am still right here both of us now gathering at these wetlands and even though you had given up trying to find me and even though I celebrated your great egret of flight I will always regret my lateness. Mourning Comes Loneliness is breakfast in a dead love’s house on the morning of their burial. Even making the coffee is a solemn ceremony, a preparation for the silent days to come. Before you died I always loved a good funeral filled with the gravitas & the remembrances of a life fully lived-- so unlike a wedding with its fluff lacking all the tendrils of the dark. After you shot yourself I slept for a year. Last night the coyotes woke me screaming in the distance & by morning I knew that one of the deer living in our greenbelt was dead. Today I stand on the patio shrouded in the live oaks of summer & I see your old blue Buick rising in the Eastern sky. Stephanie K. Merrill (she / her) has poems published in The Rise Up Review, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, UCity Review, Moist Poetry Journal, Amethyst Review, Dear Poetry Journal, One Art, Sage Cigarettes, and elsewhere. Stephanie K. Merrill is a Pushcart Prize nominee. She lives in Austin, Texas.
Donna
4/6/2023 08:59:05 am
I know I am alive with emotions that make me feel something when I read your wonderful poetry. Without others expressions of their pain I stand alone. Thank you for helping me connect to life. Comments are closed.
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