Author Archives: presssendpoetry

Author and editor for Press Send Poetry. Marketing for Barcoding, Inc. #Baltimore #Poet

Everything ends.

Everything ends.
You will end. As will I.
This winter, these frozen cobwebs of memory like so many
rivulets of ice will
melt into spring lakes
My smooth hands will gnarl like roots of old trees,
and you won’t recognize them anymore.

One day, seeing a stranger,
you’ll run from me when i ask you to dance,
and your frantic footbeats will fade away,
leaving an empathetic silence.

Inhale, Exhale, Snow

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Soft bed of snow in a dark forest, two bodies breathe.

Inhale –
we feel the cold burden, the dead weight,
it presses for answers as our chests fight to rise, rise, rise …
Exhale–
gratefully, audibly. When it’s over, snow settles
on our eyelids with the lightest touch. We, in ancient silence,

lay breathless.

Apple Blossoms by Susan Kelly-DeWitt (American Life in Poetry)

Loved this poem from Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry column. It’s been a hard winter – let poetry warm your soul 🙂

American Life in Poetry: Column 462

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

This year’s brutal winter surely calls for a poem such as today’s selection, a peek at the inner workings of spring. Susan Kelly-DeWitt lives and teaches in Sacramento.

Apple Blossoms

One evening in winter
when nothing has been enough,
when the days are too short,

the nights too long
and cheerless, the secret
and docile buds of the apple

blossoms begin their quick
ascent to light. Night
after interminable night

the sugars pucker and swell
into green slips, green
silks. And just as you find

yourself at the end
of winter’s long, cold
rope, the blossoms open

like pink thimbles
and that black dollop
of shine called

bumblebee stumbles in.

 

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2001 by Susan Kelly-DeWitt, whose most recent book of poems is The Fortunate Islands, Marick Press, 2008. Poem reprinted from To a Small Moth, Poet’s Corner Press, 2001, by permission of Susan Kelly-DeWitt and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

creation is not a quiet stuttering dance

I never thought of you.

I never imagined it. And I always thought you could create a life
Like you construct yourself,
In the dark, with your hands in the air of a dream.

But no. When it snows and is silent, bones are ancient with
truth like skies so cold all of us reaching our hands up in the dark
shudder in realization:
creation is not a quiet stuttering dance.
It is our stars bent on self-destruction, it is anything but a dream.

clock and I are shadows (insomnia)

clock takes a turn with me about the room,
we are shadows, and lights that flicker and dance from passing cars
drive us slowly mad with desire –

clock and I waltz about the room
tracking light movements
with precision of hunters until, suddenly, each is swallowed
whole by us in the darkness –

clock and I laugh, spinning, the world
outside growing older, each star following the same path set,
a quick flicker before our dark tongues close in with a smirk.