| Two Poems by Athena O. Kildegaard | ||
Homesick Proserpine came up to comfort her mother. And she could not. She lolled about the kitchen snapping beans as if they were chicken's necks. Nothing could make her feel again as if something mattered. She went dancing with her friends but under the music's bright rhythms all she heard was a dirge. She could only shuffle past the girls in tangerine-peel blouses and the boys in their calculated black, to the bathroom where she sat with hands on her knees waiting it out. On a morning of butterflies her mother sent her for strawberries. To the field from which you can see the three cedars growing at an angle. She went, an apron covering her damask skirt, the basket on her head keeping her cool. It was easy, so many strawberries. Bees drunk on abundance. No one near, a silence that seeped in under her skin. The berries so ripe they left honey on her fingers. She licked until her tongue hurt. Until all was swollen and raw. She stood between the rows, bees lolling on her ankles, and removed her apron, blouse, skirt and then lay down naked upon the leaves, berries crushed and bleeding into her belly, onto her thighs, against her collarbone that formed a plow. If she could but turn the earth and put herself down into the furrow so that only her hair lay above, a plant bursting with fruit, home, home, home. On My Daughter's Birthday This morning in the grammar class we learned to say what someone else had said. I wrote Ma Jin's mother said that Ma Jin should be sure and keep her hands clean, in Spanish. And then, walking down the nine cramped flights of stairs I stopped at a landing, the mottled glass allowing only light, and thought so loudly I had to blink, My god, she's nine years old! The last nine years, nine years to come, and nine after that, nine plus nine, they all added up, there on the third landing, to an impossibility: some years, nine plus how many more from now, she will wake up on September 2 and think—softly, so softly she'll have to listen—of a time when I held her hands under running water, slipped my fingers into the spaces between hers, held our hands together under the water long after they had become clean. _________________________________________________________________________ ATHENA O. KILDEGAARD
lives with her family in Guanajuato, Mexico. Her poetry Click here to read Athena Kildegaard's beautiful translations of Jaime Sabines' poetry. |