At 72, it takes two tries to get each foot into my jeans. I wobble and catch myself against the closet shelf. At 72, I nap each day enjoy my dreams scary or complex, puzzles to ponder in waking hours. At 72, it seems absurd that I remember a child’s great great grandmother. I'm a walking history text. At 72, my 87-year-old friend says I am young. I should not fret but get to work. I have another 20 years. At 72, I think of poems unwritten, songs unsung and return to my desk. The day is young.
Author: Cynthia M. Sheward
Cynthia Sheward has written poetry since she was a child. She was born in Massachusetts but spent her young life in New Jersey. She applied her English degree from Arcadia University teaching junior-senior high school in Vermont the 70’s. In the 80s, she and her husband built their own house with their own hands in the mountains of North Carolina. In the 90s, she returned to NJ where she worked for a Fortune 500 corporation until her retirement.
Her work has been published in Friends Journal, Evening Street, the Bennington Banner, Fiber Arts Magazine, the Mountain Times and various other print media.
She currently resides in Jupiter, Florida.
HOME
Truth runs thin in homes diluted by pills and alcohol. There’s no hook to hang your hat upon, no rock on which to stand. Mothers park along the driveway at school’s end. Our Buick sits cock-eyed across the curb. I long to be like other kids, but know I’m not. Vodka bottles line the linen closet - a fully-feathered duck rests in the freezer. I show it to my friend. The puppy ate mom’s sleeping pills and will not wake again. School is worse - so many faces whose chatter makes no sense to me. I am not them. Sunday’s comics fill me with dread. There’s no vacation from fear, only blank days that stretch ahead.
MISSING
The Lord’s Prayer went missing today on my knees no words to say. Often a name, a place evaporates as I reach for it. Whole chunks of books I’ve read when opened, I’ve lost the thread. I used to drive with knowledge sure of roads from today and long ago my sense of place, a source of pride. That map in my brain is gone. This troubles me. It isn’t clear what’s normal. What I should fear. I trust the journey - friends, family, God and if I must – will seek in books, maps, stories, prayers to fill my lips and ease my grip upon this world and what remains – the precious gift of days and hours, I ‘ve yet to claim.
ORIGINAL SIN
To which sins shall I confess?
Panic when as an infant, you’d hold your breath and faint?
Complicity moving away from Grandpa?
Weakness, letting you visit your father who was still drinking?
I apologize
for the dogs you did or didn’t like
for shopping trips where you spent money like a Sheik
for not punishing your $300 pre-Christmas phone bill
for loving you when you were your least loveable.
We refract the light that spawns us
Blue permissiveness from black strictness
Green sprouts from shiny white bread
Time unearths our original sin,
imperfection.
ADRIFT
Adrift in time,
days wash by
without regard
for date or name.
A whole week
vanished in August.
There is nowhere to go.
No one wants our dollars.
Once we modeled democracy.
Our story now's a dark comedy.
The President says the virus
will vanish like a mist.
No problem, he’s got this.
Magical realism is fine for
Isabel Allende and
Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
but has no place in a country where
people die alone in crowded hospitals
city folks swarm to the country
morgue trailers line city streets.
A pandemic’s not a minor event,
a slight inconvenience.
It stops the world.
No magic can blind us
to the growing
pile of corpses.
SCOTTIE
Warm at my back, black Aberdeen dreams his fourteen years chasing - never catching cat and deer. Awake he seeks me if I leave his sight. Howls the agony of my upstairs to his down. His almond eyes give the lie to a gentle way companion in migraine patient with children. He cannot hear me when I call – stares heavenward for long spells. Smells better than any dog I know. I carry him upstairs, set him on my bed, turn out the light. Warm at my back, black Aberdeen Goodnight.
REDUCTION IN FORCE
As I walk the old railroad bed away from town violets and periwinkles peer from bright green ground cover and the funky protozoan scent of the Raritan fills my nostrils. A cardinal’s scarlet flashes from a Sycamore overhead and two gold finches,like acrobatic dandelions, frolic through the green haze of trees. The path is lined with skunk cabbage, daffodils and buttercups, their mix of intention and happenstance so like life’s. High above, almost out of range, a hawk circles. The hum of the nearby Interstate hardly matters here. Its slinky spasms and urgencies are no longer my problem. I’ve traded those for the white flowers of May Apples, emerald velvet of moss and the disappearing tail of a red fox trotting into the trees. The world of commerce and its stresses computers, paperwork, clocks and what they count roll off me in a grateful sigh. I have lost my job and gained the world.
SELF-MADE MAN
No one comes from nothing.
Who birthed him – potty trained him
taught him to tie his shoes?
The concept’s blind to the myriad
lives that touch our own -
The workers who create roads
The teachers, who teach math and language
The plumbers who keep the sewers working
The linemen who climb poles to keep the lights on
Who made the shirt he wears?
His shoes? His socks?
His BVDs?
Rich or poor we all rely on weaver, seamstress
garbageman and priest
to help us through our days.
In this time of plague, we’re reminded
no infant can change its own diaper.
WOMEN
We arrive with our eggs
carried like loose change
until time and sperm meet
and a baby grows where
nothing has lived before.
We cast the best eggs first
save lesser ones for later
like unmarried daughters
spinster cells - homely but
good at housekeeping.
The price for children is pain
mental and physical.
Childbirth is the well-kept secret
of forcing a bowling ball
through a buttonhole.
Unmentioned too are cramps which
yield only to tub, hot pad
or drugs - the feeling of one’s
innards being yanked out
like a dropped transmission.
And Lizzie Borden days when PMS
changes our minds to war zones.
Anger and profanity replace finer
feeling and a flat tire is reason
to call the suicide hotline.
Did I choose the wrong gender?
I wonder until 20 hours in
when they hand me you, made in me.
A miracle to erase
the memory of pain.
NESTS
The whole place we built by hand
not just paper and paint.
We hung rafters from the sky
a chimney and bright metal roof
which sang in every rain.
We walked blank land and invented
life anew in the Blue Ridge
as if anyone ever starts again.
Years later a blind date remarked
“You’ve spent your life on houses.”
True. Like a nest-obsessed bird, I’ve
painted my way from town to town
designing space for friends and music,
tables to sit at and chairs to read in.
I envisioned a family unlike
my scattered patchwork
which rarely gathers where I live.
All that time and work
for a life dreamed of
a love desired – perhaps that’s
why birds have not just nests
but wings.
