Mother to Two Daughters, Ellis Island 1907
POETRY
by Judith Harris
Imagine, globes lit with a horseman’s torch,
streets of asphalt, a bolt of cotton
to sew into a dress, hot running water;
so save your glee for the pavilion, your feet
for high top shoes, fingers for spooling thread,
and your good tears for picture shows.
This new world seems silly and rich,
goose feathers stuffed into a pillow,
pink ribbons and platinum combs for your hair.
On wintery nights in Odessa, you’ll remember
how we sleighed in our fur and sheepskin coats,
hearing jingles of gentlemen’s spurs in the snow,
or sat facing each other playing cat’s cradle,
next to the black Singer sewing machine
marked in gold leaf, an iron foot pedal
on the wood floor. But there were darker nights,
the thunderous hooves of the Cossacks,
with their muskets and sabers, people crowded
into their houses and set on fire, the heaps
of human bones. Forget them now, in these rushing
waters, and let the moon hold up its lantern;
fold back the pages of the sea, while snowy
seabirds hoot and circle overhead.
Frothed waves licking and blowing back the sand
in this foreign tongue of this foreign land,
and in the sky’s amnesia, a blue light lavender
never seen before, only these chiming buoys
more entrancing than sleigh bells, after all.
Judith Harris is the author of three collections of poetry: Atonement and The Bad Secret, published by LSU Press, and Night Garden, published by Tiger Bark Press. She is also the author of two critical books on poetry and psychoanalysis, Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self through Writing, which was published by SUNY Press, and The Poetry of Loss: Romantic and Contemporary Elegies, published by Routledge in 2023. Harris’s poems have appeared in The Nation, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Hudson Review, North American Review, Image, Alaska Quarterly Review, Literary Matters, Poetry East, Terrain, Ploughshares, Bellevue Review, Slate, Verse Daily, the syndicated newspaper column “American Life in Poetry,” Poetry Foundation’s “Poem of the Day,” and “Poem-A-Day” from the Academy of American Poets.
◄ Previous page | Return to the table of contents for the Apple Valley Review, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Fall 2024) | Next page ►