Suzanne Swanson
Image by Nige Hurll on Pixabay
Suzanne Swanson is the author of House of Music and the chapbook What Other Worlds: Postpartum Poems. She is a winner of the Loft Mentor Series; she helped to found Laurel Poetry Collective. Recent poems have appeared in Terrain, The Hopper, Salamander, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Texas Borderlands Poetry Review, Poets Reading the News, SWWIM, and in the Land Stewardship Letter. She rows on the Mississippi River and is happiest near big water.
Traveling west to look for migrating geese, making a stop at Fairview cemetery
Where are you now? I cannot find you anywhere, “Searching,” Laura Jensen
Ten years after the last shovels
and fake grass. The visits
shorten. This trip on the cusp
of spring. I remove
my gloves, sweep away stiff
poplar leaves, edges curled, grass
clippings, too, from the red stone
where they sheltered
all winter. Two spots
of dark wet dirt on my two
fingers, a darkness graying quickly
in the sweep of an east
wind marking the cold
front’s advance. I kiss my fingers
press them to my father’s
name. Kiss. Mother. They prayed
for eternity and now
here it is at the edge
of a shallow lake growing
thick with unwelcome
phragmites, open
fields beyond, plowed yet still
holding ancient decayed
roots -- little blue, turkey-
foot -- a memory generations
long and still the chapped
wind swoops and sweeps
and swirls the old
tallgrass prairie, scouring
its surface, unable ever to know
what lies beneath.
©2021 West Trade Review
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Stay Connected to Our Literary Community. Subscribe to Our Newsletter
Listen Here:
