Issue 8
September 2001
Judith Schiele
Poetry found me November 1, 1996. Having no formal training in writing, I simply try to express through poetry the way life speaks to me. I have been published in Maelstrom, This Hard Wind, The Writer's Quill, Emotions, Wilmington Blues, Rant, The Rose & Thorn, Somniloquy, Poetic Voices, was chosen as a juried poet at Houston Poetry Fest '99, and published in the anthology.
Now the End
It comes in stages,
grief.
Each step
a terrible web
of absence
and memory.
When I remember,
let me remember
in chromatic detail, let me
then forget
this black epiphany.
Again the gardens ripen.
Magnolia embalms the air
and today I follow
the flight of a bird, watch
as night descends; stars,
holes in the darkness.
Persistent, this
stillness.
Lying here, I hear
only the sound of your absence and
the end begins.
Misplaced
If I sit still long enough I'll fade,
become common as the statue in the garden.
I watched robins the better part of the day,
watched till dusk settled their busyness.
Underneath the arbor, now soaked
invisible by night, I listen
to the gentle nestling above me.
Moon-flowers, too fragile for touch,
drape the fence in transient bloom.
There seems a misplaced memory,
an almost audible message
woven in their fragrance.
I want to gather them, bury my face deep
and feel the stir.
Grappling with my mind, morning will come
and the first lashing of light
will fold them tightly back into themselves.
I'm afraid of wasted life.
Tonight the sky is vacant. I can paint
any scene I choose.
Remnant
of the beach walk; this grain of sand
inside my shoe--so small--but
how it holds my full attention, how it
irritates, yet brings back too
the pleasure felt
as my feet were sinking
with no thought of anything beyond
the next immediate step; the future
malleable, the moon drifts,
waves rush up
and over; how foam froths
in the aftermath, then sinks
invisible as reason.
after the flux,
a shell is left, and I
am gripped by a longing so deep
to be winged as that gull,
who dipped, briefly brushed against the swell,
and soared
back into the vault, oblivious.