Keeping Company

 

These days I keep company.

When I wake I try to reach

the ghost within my head

To share what I have dreamed,

As though I walked along a street

with a friend who turned a corner

and I knew, although I could not see him,

he was in the neighborhood.

 

I learned early how to be bereft.

Just two months into my seventh year

the walls crumbled and a great chasm loomed

where a man had stood —

The earthquake of my father’s death.

There followed my first-born,

my mother, husbands and a lover.

 

We are inhabited. My ghosts refuse to stay

when I go forth. They tag along,

reluctant children, urged

to go to bed before their play is done.

The fabric of the air enfolds them.

Dear ghosts, I remember!

 

Helen Ruth Freeman

Diurnal Matters

Renewal

 

Glint of the afternoon sun

angles my windshield.

Down the familiar road

the trees drip pale green shoots,

soft tiny blossoms,

white to pink to mauve…

On the far hills a haze of red berries

almost unreal in the fading light.

 

I open the car window,

feel the chill breeze,

hiss of the tires over the road still wet

from an afternoon shower.

 

Climbing higher, where the road narrows,

enclosed in an arch of greenery,

clean, fragrant, beautiful,

as though the storms of winter never were:

millions of seeds ready to fall, spread, take root;

old weatherbeaten branches

magically giving forth new buds,

gorgeous renewal.

 

Could I start my life over again,

Like this?

 

Doris Henderson

Goddess Rising, 1985