POETRY

SANDRA KOLANKIEWICZ

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OF A LONG WINTER

I should have invited you to stay and eat soup
from my great grandmother’s tureen with its
distinctive chip on the edge where the ladle
used to sit.  Instead, I’ve written this poem for
you to be folded afterwards, slid into a drawer
stuffed with the same kind of remnants as one
of mine. I wish I’d told you all I possess I do
not want, rooms full of things that found their
way to me because someone beloved died--
the piano where my grandmother played O
Susanna with amended lyrics. On the floor
beneath the bench, a rug she greeted people
with in her front hall. Aunt Emma’s on the
wall with the face of a governess who married
the master in real life and did not return home,
never produced children of her own. The
secrets of the interior world creep outside
now, and the truth of the world goes within,
like falling for a tree in the forest only to
realize living beauty cannot be owned, or
admiring the swifts swooping together like a
school of fish in the air before one by one they
dive into the chimney, or dreaming of the
seed’s pale hypocotyl emerging upon its
germination to push its head above ground so
that embryonic leaves can become themselves
and give birth to others this and every spring,
each seed buried and waiting for warmth and
light in the dark underground of a long winter. 

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Sandra Kolankiewicz is the author of Even the Cracks, The Way You Will Go, Lost in Transition, and Turning Inside Out.