One Day I Am A Field
Instantly, soundlessly, a meadow called bereft.
……………One day, a hawk’s meadow.
Above, a red-tailed hawk fools me
into thinking he’s an eagle
flaps his wings wildly
then glides until I know, yes, it is you.
What is remembered when blinded?
Try to wake to the sun’s flash of denial.
……………The problem: I am grief’s land.
One day, I am a hollow.
……………One day, a long depression of land, a hollow, carved out close to a river.
You bring me rain, carry it in your mouth
as if I were a baby bird. You make many trips.
Squat beside me.
There were never enough words between us.
Before you leave, you cover me with birch bark.
You are safe.
What I want for you:
……………To be a Mountain Bluebird, escaping the blazing forest,
or if you prefer,
……………water running downhill stretching into a river.
One Summer
…….“From the Great Above she opened her ear to the Great Below”
……………Wolkstein and Kramer, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth
I prefer to remember the shovel, not a roof, childish and drawn
like lips, stars clogging its sky, a side door slammed, a ball lost inside.
The red shovel never broke, its tin tough, its scoop curved, the inside of a hand.
The bucket did not flinch when I emptied and filled it.
When I tried to shove my face inside, it opened to me as if another seashell.
I was nothing to look at, skinny as a toothpick, hair styled like a soup bowl with bangs
insistent as skywriting: Visit Steel Pier.
That bowl?
Let it be earthenware, let it be unbreakable.
**
I am afraid, always.
Is it possible an ancestor slipped into me, won’t let go,
maybe the tall one whose life ended without memory.
You might ask how she climbed inside. I don’t know I don’t know.
**
My father’s shoes black stars.
The diving horse white, the crowd applauded
as it dove, I wanted it
to break a tiny bone—just enough to stop
its tumble from pier to dark.
Next event, Diving Bell.
Glass and metal, sight and lock,
I slipped into its cage while mother stood alone.
I don’t know why I loved that bell,
it lurched then fell, with orphaned fish, eye to eye.
Trees Of Glencar Waterfall, Ireland & Then America
They sleep together not one of them alone
layered like firewood
though they will never burn
never leave this country
for another
will remain knotted below their waterfall
like the silver beech’s impenetrable roots
lodged deep inside the sidewalk
today muffled below her shuffling feet
silver bark puddled with grey.
She is talking about Ireland. Talking about Philadelphia.
Does it matter in which country she weeps?
By the insistent bouquet of the falls
or the city beech they call widow maker
because its limbs drop without warning?
Because near the falls an empty bench
and she saw it saw him fill it
stretching thin legs opening a book wanted to phone call out
but how to reach?
She was his red maple sometimes coiled
other times beneath or above
while he sang to her senseless songs about feet or stars
calming as water.
BIO
Amy Small-McKinney’s second book of poems, Walking Toward Cranes, won the Kithara Book Prize 2016 (Glass Lyre Press). Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals, for example, American Poetry Review, Baltimore Review, and SWWIM. Her poems have also been translated into Korean (Cross-Communications Press) and Romanian (Olimpia Iacob). Her book reviews have been published by journals, such as Prairie Schooner and Matter. She resides in Philadelphia. After her husband’s death during Covid, Small-McKinney co-moderated an interactive zoom discussion at AWP: Writing From Grief & Loss, The Intersection Of Social & Personal Grief During Covid. Except for the poem, One Summer, the following poems are deeply informed by grief.
