What the Godmothers Said of Their Writing
We no longer ski down hill, edge to edge,
hair streaming like first draft lines. We trek
in spring’s cold, spot the odd snow-plant, pink
as cotton candy spun in the sky’s kettle of gray clouds.
Snowshoes strapped tight as a sonnet’s
rhyme, we move carefully through
cedars and loblolly pine, avoid drifts like wasted
words. It should be snowing, but it’s
not. We should be writing and we will,
but differently. To write, like any winter trek cuts
new trails, sometimes follows paths put down
earlier in the day or season. Some of us rediscovered
lyric lines, cadenced stanzas like the moonless night we
snowshoed the farm-field, saw stars fly, white as barn owls.
hair streaming like first draft lines. We trek
in spring’s cold, spot the odd snow-plant, pink
as cotton candy spun in the sky’s kettle of gray clouds.
Snowshoes strapped tight as a sonnet’s
rhyme, we move carefully through
cedars and loblolly pine, avoid drifts like wasted
words. It should be snowing, but it’s
not. We should be writing and we will,
but differently. To write, like any winter trek cuts
new trails, sometimes follows paths put down
earlier in the day or season. Some of us rediscovered
lyric lines, cadenced stanzas like the moonless night we
snowshoed the farm-field, saw stars fly, white as barn owls.
Melanie Perish’s poems have appeared in Sinister Wisdom, Calyx, Willawaw Journal, Persimmon Tree, rkvry, Desertwood, (University of Nevada Press, 1991), Emerging Poets (Z-Publishing, 2018, 2019), di-vêrsé-city (AIPF, 2017-2019). Passions & Gratitudes (Black Rock Press,2011) and The Fishing Poems (Chapbook, Meridian Press, 2017) are her most recent collections. She is a member of Poets & Writers, Inc. Her poems owe a major debt to careful readings by a group of poets who regularly critique her work. Their generosity is an example of Audre Lorde’s thought: Writing is solitary, but thinking is collective.
Art: Public Domain