My poem “What I Picked for the Journey” was published today by the wonderful Writing in a Woman’s Voice. My thanks to editor Beate Sigriddaughter.
What I Picked for the Journey
A strong walking stick that fits my grasp. Oatmeal raisin cookies. A few favorite poems. A heart-shaped pebble for my pocket.
I’ll leave on a day that promises sun and breeze and animal-shaped clouds. I’ll find wild blueberries and spring water pure as a child’s wonder.
I’ll pass the hours remembering forsythia in April, the softness of a baby’s skin, campfires, the smell of bread fresh from the oven. I’ll sleep where the milky way tumbles through the night sky and trees whisper to the wind.
Silver Birch Press published this poem today in their “Mothers” series. My thanks to Melanie, the Silver Birch Editor.
Thirteen Ways of LookIng at My Mother-in-Law After Wallace Stevens
An Arkansas farm woman, Boby loves Sunday drives after church to see what folks are planting and to tidy up the family graves.
In spring, when the fields are ripe with fresh manure, Boby takes a deep breath. “Smells like money,” she says.
Honesty is her virtue. She told me once “You’re not exactly what we hoped for.”
Boby has no use for corsages. “Give me something I can put in the ground.“ She has eight flowerbeds— lilies, gardenias, azaleas, roses.
Each granddaughter and great-grand has a quilt pieced from a lifetime of scraps— prints, plaids, ginghams and a bit of lace. “They look pretty good from the road,” she says.
Her mother lived on the next farm over, her uncles just beyond, ripples of family for a thousand acres, bickering, loving, gossiping, mourning.
Boby buried two husbands. The first was hers for a quarter century. The second just four years, “a bonus” she said after forty years a widow.
We spend fall weekends shelling wash tubs of pecans—300 pounds some years—our fingers raw and stained dark as the delta loam.
Always a stray underfoot—cat or mongrel dog. They show up on her doorstep. She shrugs and takes them in. The cats are all called Katie.
She played piano at church as the congregation dwindled to a half-dozen stooped, gray forms. She never cared much for the preacher.
When she turned 90, Boby announced she’d give up driving October first. Took us awhile to figure out her birthday was the 6th, and she knew she’d flunk the eye test.
She killed a rabid skunk in a neighbor’s driveway with the shotgun she keeps under the bed. “Sorry I can’t stay to visit,” she told her friend. “I’ve got a cake in the oven.”
Now 96, she lives alone, as bent, stubborn and fragile as wisteria, children scattered from acreage bought a century ago. No money in farming these days. “They’ll carry me away from here in a pine box,” she says.
First published in Third Wednesday Poetry Journal.
Quill and Parchment has published a review of my collection Today and Other Seasons and an interview in their November issue. My thanks to editor Neil Leadbetter for this honor. Here are the links.
The 3rd of my poems published by Verse-Virtual. There are so many beautiful poems in this issue. I’m honored to be among them.
Seaweed calligraphy at the tide’s edge. A crab tracks through, smears the ink. I wait for the fog to lift. The gulls argue over someone’s sandwich crust, get on with survival. I remember your words, the undertow.
Local (State College, PA) poet Sarah Russell has given us a collection of poems that are heartfelt and moving. I lost summer somewhere is poignant, elegant, and sometimes emotionally raw. Reading it drew me into a world of love and loss, of new love found, of letting go of an aging parent piece by piece, of being with someone at their most vulnerable point, of watching granddaughters grow into a world we could never have imagined. At times it was a nerve-wracking white-knuckled journey through life. But it is hard to find someone relate that journey with the grace, beauty, and dignity that Russell achieves.
Anyone who has ever been in love can both relate to and laugh with her poem, “If I Had Three Lives.” She starts,
“If I had three lives, I’d marry you in two.”
This humorous look at love then goes on to imagine her life where she did not marry him: writing, reading lots of books, vacationing in Maine, practicing yoga…and then admitting,
“And I’d wonder sometimes / if I’d ever find you.”
This quirky love poem acknowledges that marriage has changed her in ways that might not always meet her ideal (“I’d be thinner in that life, vegan”), but in two of three lives she would choose him and in the third life she’d long for him. Honestly, that’s more than a lot of us get!
The titular poem is a metaphor for aging. The poet realizes that she has entered a stage of life when geese have abandoned their nests and wildflowers have finished their blooms. I love how she says to the geese as they leave,
“I’ll stay here, I tell them, I’ll air out / cedared cardigans. chop carrots / for the soup tonight, cross / the threshold of the equinox, / try not to stumble.”
Any of us watching the years spin by faster and faster can appreciate both the sense of loss and the acceptance of our future, whatever that may be.
Although the poems offer much to every reader, I believe that women would especially appreciate Russell’s perspectives. She writes as the wife who watches a marriage crumble, as the mother there with a daughter making a difficult choice and living with that, as the grandmother advising her middle-school granddaughter. Sometimes, like in Learning to Play Baseball, she is the bemused woman struggling to communicate with a man. She is the woman watching herself age, falling in love again, appreciating new seasons of life.
That being said, this book is not “for” women or men. It is for anyone who loves language, who loves poetry, for anyone who has loved and anyone who is watching an aging parent decline, for anyone who has enjoyed an “Indian Summer” of life and found a second love and held a child. Sarah Russell’s poems are beautiful and passionate, and I lost summer somewhere is a special collection.
From my poetry collection, I lost summer somewhere.
I hid behind the spirea bushes over there, by the steps, chewed the bitter leaves, watched old Grandma Yonkers in her lace up shoes and cotton hose mince slow, slow, with her squeak-wheeled shopping cart, an hour to the store and back. She never saw me, or at least she didn’t say. The house is run down now. Probably was then too, but kids don’t notice shabby when it’s theirs. Screens are rusty, porch sags, sidewalk buckled higher from the oak. Dad said it should come out, but it’s outlived him and will outlive me as well. Its acorn caps made high-pitched squeals between my thumbs I crooked just so. We’d rake its leather leaves in piles at the curb, light fires in the twilight, watch embers spit into the blueblack dusk, the scent of autumn in my hair.
Sarah Russell
First published in I lost summer somewhere
I’m thrilled to announce that my first collection I lost summer somewhere has just been published and is available at Amazon and through Kelsay Books.
Here are some of the great things my fellow poets have said about it.
“Melancholy, exuberance, nostalgia, fulfillment, contentment, longing – Sarah Russell hits all the spots, and there isn’t one poem where a woman won’t be able to identify in some way. She’s singing all our songs, putting into magical words things we felt so often but never knew how to tell. Deep sadness matched by laughter, gentleness, love and a sense of adventure. It was a privilege being there with her, living what she remembers, identifying with every line.”
Rose Mary Boehm, author of Tangents, From the Ruhr to Somewhere Near Dresden, and Peru Blues
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“Sarah Russell brings us into her world, a world of “dream-filled summer nights,” where “leaves are October butterflies.” Russell’s poems sing the important moments of life. It’s a song that stays in your mind, drawing you back to the poems again and again.”
Nina Bennett, author of Mix Tape and The House of Yearning
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“Sarah Russell’s poems don’t have to crawl under your skin – they’ve always been there. If you haven’t known a suicide, or gone through divorce or cancer, you’ve known the fear. If you’ve never had a love you’d marry twice if you had three lives, you’ve felt the longing. Russell may have lost summer somewhere, but she has found what makes us human.”
Alarie Tennille, author of Waking on the Moon and Running Counterclockwise
Yesterday’s south wind rushed warmth
to February snow. Today the earth
is boggy with new grass, tattered white
in crannies on north sides of things.
Daffodils finger their way toward light,
and old women’s feet no longer tremble
on their way to market.
I sit at the water’s edge,
draw circles in the sand.
It was almost too civil. Last night
we walked down the beach
to the crab shack,
tied bibs around our necks,
and over a bucket of clams and corn
decided who got what.
Circles, short-lived in the tide,
my wedding ring in the dresser drawer.
Sarah Russell Poetry 