Two Poems
Pausing in the Trenches
Who would have thought sky stronger than ground, maker
of wind, cover to the seas? For hours we dug
without looking up, forgetting that fifty
percent of our life happens above, beyond,
outside of any known boundary except
for atmosphere. Still the only star I know
is North as if helpful in navigating
beyond the earth. What would we try then, afloat
and free? Sextants useless without longitude,
the latitude that once obsessed us become
irrelevant, nothing on which to gauge our
progress or place. Certainly a figure with
a long white beard put us here, you say, ignored
by the rest of us with our shovels, the first
to pause and glance up, away from the mud and
rock beneath our wet boots into indigo
with a gauze of mackerel skin laid over
it like a tissue meant to protect us from
too much beauty, which cannot be born, just as
one is not supposed to see the face of God.
–
Possibility
Two ways to approach the unknown:
with a tickle of anticipation or a wave
of dread, as if standing on the shore as the
boat finally arrives when you’re really on
the back step, smoking a cigarette, hearing
the sirens rise above the yard’s only tree, higher
than the doves, usually the only sound this
time of evening, the water in your head flat
and calm as right before a storm, the waves
behind your eyes keeping their promises, the
alarms outside in the air, theirs. Behind the
fence, you will hold the good in your arms today,
forget the stuttering between hope and despair on
the street while you concentrate on the mango
tree by the swing set, its fruit just appearing.
~
Sandra Kolankiewicz has published nearly 200 poems and stories in reviews, most recently in BlazeVox, Gargoyle, Fifth Wednesday, Prick of the Spindle, Per Contra, Prairie Schooner, Appalachian Heritage, and Pif. Turning Inside Out won the Black River Prize at Black Lawrence Press. Blue Eyes Don’t Cry won the Hackney Award for the Novel. This fall, Finishing Line Press published her chapbook entitled The Way You Will Go. A novel with 76 illustrations, After I Fell, is soon to be released by Web-e-Books. She lives with her family in Marietta, Ohio, and teaches at a community college in West Virginia.