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Amy P.
Amy's Pen
Poetry, Prose and Ponderings of a Student
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
The Crossing
In dreams
I walk on water
Fingers outstretched
To the edge of the world
For once, I emerge from the picture
Frozen in yellows and reds
A tainted faith
Leaves a stained-glass salvation
As trembling hands leave
Cathedrals in their wake
I walk on water
Fingers outstretched
To the edge of the world
For once, I emerge from the picture
Frozen in yellows and reds
A tainted faith
Leaves a stained-glass salvation
As trembling hands leave
Cathedrals in their wake
Originally published in Spring 2013 issue of The Germ
Sunday, January 6, 2013
The Awakening
You tighten your grip on your
wind-battered umbrella and huddle beneath its protective wing. The headstone
before you is dark and impending, mimicking the distant mountains, almost
glaring at you as you bend over and arrange your store-bought daisies in the
little built-in vase. How your grandmother loved flowers. Already you can smell
her rosy perfume serenading your nostrils. You remember the garden she kept in
the back of her house and how she would let you inside it. She would name all
the flowers, stretching around you like an endless rainbow. After you had seen
all of the buds, she would fetch her watering can and feed the flowers, all the
while telling you how important water was in sustaining life. “Water is the key
to any garden,” she would say. “Without it, there can be no growth.” Then she
would go on about the beauty of the flowers and the satisfaction of tending
them. She’d given you some seeds, once—pansies, your favorite—and encouraged
you to plant them in your apartment window tray.
But you didn’t listen back then. You
never listened. Always too busy. Always something else on your mind. What was
growing a bunch of skimpy flowers compared to getting your rent paid a month in
advance? What was a watering can compared to a raise at work? What was a homegrown
garden compared to a house—a real house? You gulp, a teardrop swelling in your
eye when you remember the cold, callous funeral procession, full of
intoxicating well-wishes and sobering hymns. It wasn’t until the dust
accumulated on your unopened pansy seeds that you began to wonder if a garden
might do you good. You started thinking about the seeds and how you’d never
planted them or given them water, how you’d never given them anything but a
dusty existence on the corner of your shelf. Your head felt unusually jammed as
you mulled it all over. A garden wouldn’t hurt. In fact, you rather liked the
idea. Maybe you could plant the pansies. Maybe you could start over.
Rising to your feet, you glimpse the
daisies, still strangled by their price tag, and you sigh. It will do no good.
You’ve forgotten to pick up the gardening tools on your way here. You have no
shovel. You have no spade. You don’t even have a watering can. What a fool
you’ve been, thinking it was that easy, that simple to nurture life. Now those
cheap daisies are the best that you will ever do. Biting your lip until it
bleeds, you swallow and turn away from the gravestone. And then a drop of water
splashes onto your cheek.
The umbrella slips out of your palm
and sprawls on the grass, sticky and shriveled. You take the packet of seeds out
of your pocket. You get down on your hands and knees and start tearing open the
earth. The soil cakes your fists as you dig further down. You hadn’t stopped to
examine the packet or read the directions. But what four-by-four inch packet
could explain how to coax flowers from the ground, how to wring water from the
skies or how to hold the sun’s potent gaze long enough to make it all possible?
What could ever explain any of that to you?
You feel the rain spilling over you
and suddenly you can see. The trees become an emerald carpet spread over the
mountains, distant and knowing, veiled in cloudy starlight. The rain dares to
whisper its secrets to you as it drums across the grass. The moist, grimy earth
mixes with the cold, crisp water as you empty the packet into the man-made hole
before hastily packing the dirt back in again. A paid rent, a raise at work and
a real house are the last thing on your mind now as the water soaks your face
as surely as it is soaking the pansy seeds, lying in wait beneath the earth.
All your life, you’ve waited for
this garden. You gaze up at the sky, a chalky silver, and see the clouds
unfurling. The radiance splashes onto the graves around you, shedding light
onto the unborn pansy seeds as if to wake them from their slumber, enticing
them to bloom a season early. You scrape the tears from your cheeks and gaze at
the smooth stone in front of you. She has never been this close before.
You feel the rain spilling over you
and suddenly you know that the world will keep turning, the water will keep falling,
and the flowers will keep blooming. Your lips break into a smile. You can’t
believe it’s taken you this long.
First published in Smashed Cat Magazine
Published in Fictitious Magazine
Read It Here
Friday, December 28, 2012
The Pieta
Dismantled,
With
ropes, pulleys, hammers;
Her
heart screams into silence,
Her
lungs stretched thin
As
rugs beaten dry;
Her
dirt-crusted fingers
Clutch
the white body;
The
veins of her hands turn
Pink,
red, purple;
Little
does she know—
His
embrace is tighter than hers Published in Calvary Cross
You are
Shackled
to earth, I wander
Rugged,
broken, restless
No
compass in this yellow-brown
Expanse
of my pockmarked soul
Time
gnaws my wrists and ankles
Death
drums as she always does
You
shatter the silence and
Call
me by name
My
soul crumbles
I
am fleeting—
You
are.
Published in Calvary Cross
Published in Calvary Cross
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