The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Sleigh Bed & Before DarkBy Barbara Alfaro QuailBellMagazine.com Sleigh Bed Visiting Emily Dickinson’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts. After days divided into increments of grocery lists, poetry, and baking bread, weary and delighted, you slip into your dark wood single bed and feel soft linens against your skin. Did you exchange hungry kisses
with Judge Otis P. Lord on that bed? Or, was it sacred space where only dreams and poems were wed? Harvard looted everything of yours except this sleigh bed, its head and foot boards slanting outward, where you lay listening and let the hodgepodge of eternity in. Before Dark “Home before dark,” our mother’s voice trails after my brother and me like a kite tail as we scamper to stick ball. Sundown happens too soon so we run to the blue house as if our lives depend on time. After supper, in the hallway, I hear “She’s got to stop following me around” and imagine his pals poking fun at a skinny kid sister tagging along. Today, I can’t help it; I’m happy. God knows why. I’m holding on to heaven. If I let go, what’s there? Nothing but memory and pain. I confess I’ve been unfaithful to my dreams and my stories, leaving them alone and unwritten in the distant shimmering house, the house they burst forward from, rushing and true. I have to keep writing. That’s how it is, before dark… Comments
Ellen Sullivan
10/4/2016 11:57:59 am
Congratulations Barbara on two beautiful poems above. Wishing you all the best, Ellen Comments are closed.
|