Poetry

• Best Poem: http://bestpoem.wordpress.com/2009/01/

A Poetry Journal
Barbara Trachtenberg January 31, 2009
Early May

The dogwood blossoms seem best when I’m alone.
The white one’s brown, mottled kisses
like smudged lipstick on each petal.

I love the blossoms’ four prone petals
thrown back shallow cups of sun
iridescent in the gathering afternoon storm.

Their dancers’ arms interrupt each other,
children, calling, “Me, me! Oh, see my spring.”

Cut now in a glass pitcher
they’re as vulnerable in their perfect beauty
as our most private moments together.

• Boston City Hall Poetry Exhibit

"Raymond and Thelma in Boston"

Barbara Trachtenberg

Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking. Walt Whitman

We are seventeen and twenty-five
as your hand pulls me with you away
from Boston, your feet planted, mine barely
defined, as though unsure of my step
in the coming night
of this chill June day in Boston
the sky pushing blue,
some fire forcing us on.

“Thelma, here are the chickens of my grandparents’ farm.
and there the tomatoes and a prairie dog.
We ate squirrels, you know.”
“Not koshered,” I say.
“Not in Boston,” you say.
“A mockingbird, Thelma!” your head bobbing,
your hand still grabbing at mine, “Let’s find it.”

Could we have met in Missouri?
In the 30s or 40s? Talked to each other?
A Yiddle in Middle America, my great-grandfather
a Russian, peddling rags to that Scottish farmer
Of the Methodist persuasion?
They lived like cousins, in city and country,
depended on each other somehow
in a time Civil, in a state in the middle
of middle America, later come to Boston.

In this other June night warmed by
quilts and our bodies, we remember them
lying near each other in their cemeteries now,
lying, like us, in the beds of
recycled cloth and earth we come from,
meeting each other in our bedtime talk
in Boston, as we recall
seventeen and twenty-five,
the farms, the rags.