Susan Martinello lives in Gulf Shores, Alabama. She loves the beach and practices T’ai Chi.
Her poems have appeared in Birmingham Arts Journal and POEM, as well as Whatever Remembers Us: An Anthology of Alabama Poetry.
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From the Other Side
I held their hands tight,
hugged them to me,
taught them to swim on the pond.
Now I find myself watching
from the opposite bank of a river
for a chance to wave.
I want to be in their camp,
to sit around the fire,
describe the gentle night
rain on Macchu Picchu,
the shimmer of dawn droplets.
But they have painted paths
across the water stranding me,
as I stranded my parents
long ago on erasable sands,
so many words lost.
I cast about and find
a battered, green canoe,
no paddle. I write my life,
fold the many sheets
into airplanes, launch them
out over the swift water
where they all fall short,
race downstream like speed boats.
I gather a few photographs,
place them in the fragile canoe,
and push it out across the current,
counting on a fallen branch
to snag it on their shore
with my postcards from the other side.
Shower Down in Earthly Seeds
My wedding day was hailed by thousands
of ravenous gypsy moths showering
the ground from oaks and pines with grains
of elemental humus, a real
gift of fertility, not really
a desecration of trees,
but a taking away and giving back,
like the gradual gobbling up
of this woman into the soil of marriage.
Had I been showered in rice, instead,
outside the yellow-windowed chapel,
my life might not have drained earthward,
my hands become stained with digging,
mixing, sprinkling soil on seed,
my head bent to the task, my back
an ancient worn-down mountain top.
Against all mourning for that woman,
eaten green and recast brown by years,
a leathery leaf with filigreed edges,
against any acknowledgement of omen
in the June rain of green-brown droppings,
I toss the Buddhist pinch of rice
to shower down in earthly seeds
its pings of generosity.