Ekphrastic Challenge Responses

 Mary McCarthy’s Painting: Grief

 

 Mourning By Mary McCarthy

My grief is a winter owl
in a live oak tree
the Spanish moss
weeping for me.
My grief is perfectly
camouflaged,
patterned feathers
against patterned bark.
My grief is the silence
of air passing
beneath the owl’s wings
soundless
so that the mouse
has no fear
until the final pounce.
My grief coughs up
old bones and scraps
of undigested fur
unable to absolve
everything it takes.
My grief sleeps all day
to ride the night out
wide eyed and alert
listening
to small dreams
stirring in the grass
thinking of second chances
the taste of moonlight
and blood, like wild
strawberries in the snow.

HEART By Barbara Crooker

Tell me, she asked, how is your heart? Without being maudlin
or falsely sentimental, I tell her mine cracked apart fifty years ago,
the day my first daughter was born, still as a quiet pond. No breath
to ruffle the surface. They thought they were being kind when they
whisked her away before I could memorize her face. I was certain
I could hear her faint cry, but that was only in my dreams. I wanted
to wrap her in flannel, hold her in my arms. But they stayed empty.
So my heart has a scar, the railroad ties of a silver zipper. Some days,
it’s closed tight, clenching its metal teeth. Some days, the slider
slips the tracks, and my heart is opened to the sky, the random clouds,
the small fine music of the rain. Sometimes it burns, hot as molten lava.
Sometimes it brims with unshed tears. Sometimes it unravels, needs
to be sewn up again, embroidered with satin floss. This scar is invisible;
nobody has ever seen it. It’s prominent as Hester Prynne’s scarlet A.
Some losses you never get over. You think sorrow is the only tune
your heart can sing. Sometimes what’s broken makes you stronger,
flint on granite, carried in your chest. Nothing can enter this stone cave.
And that’s when you realize you’re also holding your heart in your hand,
translucent glass, refractive and iridescent. Hold it to the light; you can
see right through it. Toss it on the ground, and surely it will break. 

Invisible Arms Around My Neck by Rose Mary Boehm

Never really got to know you because
you left too early. Never saw you,
except with my heart’s eyes. Still,
I loved you as I did the others. And ever since
I began to bleed, you’ve been with me,
in my heart, in my flesh. I will always
think of you as my second child.

What I Know by Donna Hilbert

Because I awaken
at 6:19
to pain
as if my heart
were a wishbone
pulled apart,
I am not surprised
when they climb
the stairs
to tell me
you are dead.
Now I understand
what fear is:
waiting
for the messenger
to tell me what
I know.


Grief and the Burning Bush by Joan Leotta

Even after twenty years, my tears still set my heart on fire, pain that splits me open. Pain that reaches out to the light of the stars, reminding me that no matter what, we must shine where we are. Even death cannot stop the flow of love even into and from the “beyond.” A glass of cranberry juice, spotting his favorite jam in the grocery store—I cannot reach for these without thinking of him, sometimes seeing him so sharply that I burst into tears.

Joe was only days away from his twentieth birthday when he was hit by a car on campus at Virginia Tech. A sophomore with enough credits to be a junior, he was majoring in political science (like me!) but loved theatre, also like me, and very like my father.
 
I think Joe might have become a lawyer had he lived. It’s a career that would have combined his love of performing and his deep desire to work for social justice. On his last full day alive, in 2002, he walked all over Blacksburg trying to find a lawyer to sponsor the campus ACLU. Joe was passionate about getting rid of the death penalty in Virginia. (I recently learned that happened in 2021! I rejoiced and toasted Joe in heaven.)

Distance is no barrier between loving hearts. Our son has now been parted from us for longer than he was with us on this earth, yet I feel him near me more often than you might think, for I believe that like distance neither death itself is a barrier between loved ones. Like the fire of the burning bush, the pain of separation burns, but does not have to destroy the tree, and like the stars can still shine the light of love from afar.


The Wailing Woman by Sharon Waller Knutson

Sobs awaken me
at midnight
as I sleep soundly
in my flat
in the Portuguese
District in Toronto.

The kind of wailing
from a widow
of a fallen soldier
or a woman
with an empty womb.

I stare at the ceiling
for what seems like hours
wondering which floor,
which wall she weeps behind.
Then I hear only silence.

The next morning a woman
in a scarf speaking broken
English knocks on my door.
I search for streaked
mascara or mud puddles
but see only smooth skin.

A woman pulls a suitcase
down the stairs smiling
silently. I see no black
clouds in her blue sky
eyes as she hails a cab
bound for the airport.

Who died? Who broke
Your heart? I want to ask
all the females I meet
in the hallway or street
but I don’t because
the wailing woman
could be any of us, even me.


Do Not Go Just Yet by Abha Das Sarma

I kneel
hour after hour
casting myself
into pouring darkness
over a long winding night.

I see your pain lifting
with the rising of your face
above the naked trees,
like the clouds sifting pink
behind an eternal grey.

A house of many doors,
a table well laid,
beauty in place,
just as you had wished.

Happy Landings,
you said to every journey I set.
Tonight, I am the eye of the storm.
I carry thunder in my hair,
stars fall on earth in slow drizzle.

The fishermen pull the nets
over the shore until its time
to lay them in waters again.

Two poems by Shaun R. Pankoski

Contradictions
 
Why do I feel so untethered? The night is bright with stars.
I am sheltered by a capitulum of leaves, settled in the crotch,
connected by a trunk, braided into the earth.
 
But the birds have stopped singing. The world is on fire.
I am consumed. My immolated heart would float
like ash, if not for these tears that anchor me.

Grieving

Overcoat of night-
wrap me up in solitude,
walk me to the edge
so that I may burn to char
from an invisible fire.


Speeding Good-Bye by Alarie Tennille
 
New to death. Young
and dumb with grief, we
welcomed my aunt’s orders.
 
Gladly let another mind rule
our hands as we purged
Mama’s closets and dressers.
 
When Daddy came home
from the hospital, he’d be
too weak for such work.
 
He’d never be up to it. So we
packed her tiny shoes and bright
dresses for Goodwill,
 
kept just a few pieces of jewelry.
We left him no nightgown
to cradle, no familiar cologne,
 
no hint she might only
have gone to work for the day.  
A cruel kindness.


Ex Libris by Tina Hacker

Captured inside a dream,
Grandmother screamed
a nightly refrain
that rattled like a snake’s warning.
“Coming for me. Coming for me. Coming for me.”
The melancholy triad imitated
the swaying intonations
of daily davening
in a rural shul in Illinois.
A small building,
deliberately innocuous,
it offered sanctuary for immigrants
who escaped the swastika slithering
into hearts throughout Europe.
Many Jews
shared a desperate hope
that Hitler wouldn’t come.
Couldn’t come.
Here. Grandmother,
like her neighbors,
knew she had no place to hide.

She was right.
A rare book stored
at the Fuhrer’s idyllic retreat
in the Bavarian Alps, uncovers
plans for North America.
A travel guide for eliminating Jews,
binocular focus on the United States.
My grandmother’s wails confirmed her booking.

“What I Know” is from the book, Transforming Matter, PEARL Editions, 2000, “Heart” first appeared in Gargoyles, “Invisible Arms Around My Neck” in Offcourse Journal,  “Speeding Goodbye” in River Poets Journal and “Ex Libris” in Poetry Super Highway.

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