Dec 10, 2020 | Aging, Commissioned, Grief, Gus Stevens, Irregular Rhyme, Mom, Winter
She appears in the glass like a watermark and her image in the window tells the score. Her eyes, reflected, look blinkered, tired, sore as she scrapes the dishes clean. Inside: herself. Outside: the dark, and this old face between. It seemed just weeks...
Aug 16, 2018 | Grief, Guest Writer, Mark Hernberg, Mom, Quatrains, Whale
She swam to these shallow waters to give birth. Knowing only the quickening of her heart, the heart inside her; resonance of body within body, sea within sea. Her newborn calf sputtered brine, tasting the new waters. Each breath a new ocean. Again she sings him her...
Aug 4, 2018 | Grief, Gus Stevens, Heptameter, Hexameter, Mom, Whale
She let go yesterday; she thought she could let go, let him slip from her nose, and gently from the sun to sink deeper than her lungs could go; it was done. She carried her son for nine suns, and eighteen moons before. Could she let go, when the tide turned within her...
May 26, 2018 | Alexandrine, Daughter, Grief, Gus Stevens, Hexameter, Mom
There are moments that poems are unworthy of. Like the photographs that can never truly show the setting sun nor capture the new fallen snow. Their radiance flattened; their laughter hollowed out. Our highest metaphors blaspheme both life and love; all our symbols...
Dec 27, 2016 | Advent, Gus Stevens, Italian Sonnet, Mom, Sonnet
A mother’s delight and child’s torment: all those gifts beneath the glittering tree. On Christmas Eve, a singular present, always the smallest, she’d let us tear free from its bright paper. The rest must remain secrets for one more sleep: still a...
May 27, 2015 | Grief, Gus Stevens, Mom, Songs for the Dead, Sonnet, Terza Rima
If you believe that deaths do come in threes and that we are maskers in some Greek play then I am deathless, immortal to disease. No foe’s hand can spill my blood nor make me pay the infinite cost of my one own life; it must be by my hand: no other way. Mother...
