* * *
—Poetry by B. Lynne Zika, Burbank, CA
—Photos by Jiri Vlatch and B. Lynne Zika
GITA
Beneath the window passerines
cluster in their family clutch,
claiming for the afternoon
a place to share, to speak, to touch.
Behind the screen my daily plague
begins its torturous harangue.
Lone I—vanquished-—then concede:
I am now become the pain.
Beneath the window passerines
cluster in their family clutch,
claiming for the afternoon
a place to share, to speak, to touch.
Behind the screen my daily plague
begins its torturous harangue.
Lone I—vanquished-—then concede:
I am now become the pain.
—Photo by Jiri Vlatch
AND THE CUNNING SUN
Morning sun stretches long green fingers through
the grove
and cups her hand over a breast of creekbank moss.
Downriver, rapids churn the day to a start;
beech trees lean into their stately tasks.
A monarch butterfly loops around me,
tracing arabesques, wings beating a delicate thrum,
cocooning me in a silent, twinkling applause,
and the cunning sun
slips over to steal flecks of gold and copper from
my hair.
My love has gone.
___________________
AVONDALE
On the south end of Noble, gold-lettered coaches
carry children with richer daddies down a circle
of track.
Across town, a necklace of boxcars
waits to be hitched at the dock.
The mill whistle cuts the day in half.
Dye from the vats still froths the creek
bounding the house that failed to hold my mother
past the year she was of age.
The morning Mr. Raymer dropped a milk bottle
on the kitchen step, she woke to her father’s
tongue pushing past her lips, pushing away
18 years of safety. She must have gone cold,
felt the slip she’d pulled on the night before
too thin
against her body. Outside, the milkman
swept the last of the splinters
and whistled off to the comfort of his route.
Three-thousand miles later, I open a package
my mother has sent from home. A gold chain
to safekeep the charm I’ll be left when she’s gone.
A pocketknife she means for my grandson—
“My daddy’s,” she writes.
I remember a man with pockets of candy.
The way we swept into Woolworth’s,
grand with our Saturday dimes.
Our mother. Laughing.
Slapping pink balls with wooden paddles
one-hundred-and-twenty-nine times.
—Photo by B. Lynne Zika
PROMISE
Soon it will be spring.
In the patch of ground
outside the window,
fruit trees will swell
from bud to flower—
young maidens with growing breasts
preparing for the fullness
of motherhood.
They will bear fruit.
Surely
a life of pain bears
something of benefit:
a testament to the comfort
love can bring
or bearing witness to the world,
to those who believe themselves forgotten
or never seen.
I see you.
Come.
Let us remember together
the bud as it bursts open,
the sunlight casting shadows
at our feet.
____________________
Today's LittleNip:
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away.
—Elvis Presley
____________________
—Medusa, with thanks to B. Lynne Zika for her fine poetry today on this most unusual date that only happens once every four years! (Where will we be four years from now?) Anyway, visit the Kitchen again tomorrow for Lynne’s Italian Sonnet.
B. Lynne Zika
For future poetry happenings in
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