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Judith Brice


Sometimes I Forget the Sunset

Sometimes I forget the sunset,
her light listing its way
to the west and skeins
of fuchsia falling slowly
to her knees--
 
Sometimes, I only see shadows,
as they umber the road,
mist all grass and meadows
underfoot, then drench
their fields with desolate dark--
 
But quickly a leaf
of aspen might quaver me
awake, rustle my slumbering
mind and grab my gaze--
sweep my eyes to catch
 
silken embers of sun
as they topaz the sky. 
​

Chiaroscuros  ☊

Dancing their world like dappled ghosts
my shadows dissipated to chiaroscuros--
 
fleeting images
of moon yielded slowly
to dawns of warmer days
 
as frozen fields broke  
          from their fright
                         and shimmied forward
                          to sun.
 
Then sunflowers, wheat
              budded
                                                    up to radiant dreams--
 
Unfolding seams of life
           & mind
                     bloomed to flower
 
at first with hesitance,
           at first in shade, and then into a frisson
 
of Light as she opened her wings
   to spring.
 
Only then I could hear
                    shining ripples of Time,
                                                    the horizon
                                                                       on her salty breath,
 
                                her silver terns swooping
 
as seconds ticked
                                     into a glow
                     of glistening song.
​

Mourning Calls

From beyond the brume,
beyond
the horizon she swims, the mallard’s mate,
a wail for a call, brief,
before the wait
for her next plaint, shortened and hoarse
 
From around the cove she floats
into the evening lake, as its restive waves
batter the reeds, tawny and coarse
among the gray, the wind-tossed rocks.
She keens, still mourning--
pleads
 
Out into the wind she drifts,
her westward whines without hope,
amidst the singe of twilight,
a solitary
slipping of sun, singing
its own vast and disappearing song
​

The Raccoon Ball

​I watched it all day out the window
at kindergarten--
I’m sure of it, Mom.
It was sunny, no rain, no clouds.
I could see it for sure,
the gym next door,
all those inside rooms.
And there it was, the black
and round raccoon ball, pounding
one wall, then the next.
And they all kept crashing down
when that big old ball kept hitting
the doors, the windows, and building sides
after it swinged way up.
Boy mom, I could really see it.
Even furniture, Mom, smashed into pieces!
I saw a yellow truck
on the ground and a little man
working levers—two or three—.
And, oh yeah, I saw
a couple of long lines
close up to the sky, before
they ‘tached on that one last lever--
Really high, it was, I swear it,
before those long lines came down
and ‘tached again to the raccoon ball,
all big all black, which swinged
wider, stronger, wilder.
The rooms went to small pieces.
Doors cracked, too
tiny splinters of wood.
All more and more a wreck.
​

            Spring

Spring has come
to write
light poems
on the trees,
for bees to read--
to taste Silk Honeydew,
Green-Gold
and new.
​

Coda— At The Jetty

It was the haar of the sea
we heard— then the gulls,
their shiver, as they swooped
stealing the fog,
drawing it in and down
beyond the dusk, the damp,
the cage of cold--
 
and at the shore
the line of silver
birches, peeling
pummeling the wind
and our now vacant souls.


​                ♢
Picture



​​Judith Brice's profile

These Three Years--

dark days, deceit of meaning
month after month--
weeks of winters wrenching
their bare, foreboding arms.
 
No chocolates, no sweet
potatoes, nor magnolias,
daffodils come spring;
only the coldest winters of snow.
 
Words too many
for doctors to write
in tomes of tattered pages--
long since torn, scattered.
 
Days and months--
time and seconds taut,
while answers absent, elusive
float only in doubt.
 
Waiting rooms broadcast
show after show: Wolf
the View, the Talk
camouflage all agony, all angst.
 
My doctor suggests a walker,
 ‘exercise equipment,’ he opines--
while I hold my mask, place it
with care around my face.
 
More anguish
than a soul could know
more struggle
than a poem can own. 
​

The Days That Have Left Me

These are my wildest hours
of surrender, where my minutes tick
my clock back to midnight
and the seconds get too close
to black, to bleak.
 
These are the days that have left
me– blind, in a flurry of wasted
soul, a body yearning for rest
away from the searing pain
that scorches to flame.
 
I tell only of the wrench
and wrest of limb from limb,
the wish to be free
and alight on pine needles
under full cover of violet
evening, rocked in a cradle
of molten moonlight. 
​

Overhead From Longing

Sometimes, your voice catches me from
beyond and overhead, from your longing
love—I think of your timbre,
the tremolo and cords it strikes, reminiscent
always of starlings, their cantabile speech,
as they learned to sing— no, talk, to Mozart.
 
Was it he who learned
and copied their joyful trance or they
who conveyed back his sweet noise
to wrap him in a swoon of song
so sonorous that he composed concertos
so plangent that when he wrote his resplendent
 
Masses, he was able to catch an audience
in rapt and full attention, swoop
his listeners Into an evanescent murmuration
as dense and wide as the starlings,
when they disappear of a sudden
into their wild and mysterious flight?
​

Fall Again

And the sun speaks only
to trees, echoes off
turning leaves when they catch
bright whirls of wind--
while starlings, caramel brown,
sneak between blowing seeds
and ruckus of gilded, locust coins--
as squirrels patter on branches,
chase to nearby tips, then quick
hurl to hawthorns as if
in trespass by the sky,
all to catch the season’s spin
of pinwheel colors--
tangerine, burnished bronze,
            ocher red--
as they fall
       again.
​

Lesbos

Up onto the rocky shore they washed,
small bodies between
delphinium blue and sparkling
breaking waves, which tumbled
from the Aegean water, the sky--
 
but no one new knew their names
 
Up onto the rocky shore they washed,
yellow life jackets that were only toys,
never promised
to be devices for flotation,
for rescue
never promised to save lives--
 
no one knew whose lives, what names
 
Up on the rocky shore break more waves,
more small bodies without names,
families lost;
no play in the summer sun,
no splashing in the salty sea.
No one knows their names.
​

No Moon Shadows

I can’t find your God
in the graves of my pain,
no moon shadows to pluck
from evensong
nor steel stillness
in silhouettes
of these sneaky weeks to come.
I can only feel
one long restive scream,
too many creaking fissures
in bones once rent
and no peace
or silence in my home.
​

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