Three Poems by Martin Willitts Jr

At a Memorial Service, I Do Not Hold My Breath, But Sigh Air

Every word spoken out of grief enters my heart.
Grief contains praise.
I listen —

wind and rain tickling off leaves —
praise
for my trying to repair the brokenness of this earth.

Birdsongs create their daily practice
to get the tone just right,
just as perfect as sunrise.

This breath I have, I don’t want to waste it.
My lungs almost collapsed once,
and the lesson I learned was:

listen to my chest, my frantic heart
telling me, beat, beat heart, beat.
I keep working the soil,
try to heal it
as one breath.
Praise air.

Praise each morning needing repair,
needing replenishing,
tend to simple moments

when breath waits,
inhale
and exhale,

a great sigh of life
giving
and receiving.

*

The Journey

         For Alice Wood

Today, my wife’s sister died at eight o’clock in the morning,
and I swear,
this morning
birds stopped singing:

a kind of quiet that accompanies slight rain.

The kind of day that folds
like sheets fresh off the clothesline,
smelling of sunshine. The silence following
a body surrendering to sea. The way a sail can tilt
the wrong way in a sudden wind shift.

Some deaths
are measured by time, place, and circumstances.

Today,
when birds found their voices return,
they sang about hope.

Not hopelessness.
Not dirges.

But hope.

The kind of hope that arrives as a rescue in time,
or ease of dying in our sleep.
The kind of hope wanting to know
what we will find at the end of life.

*

I Wish There Was More Love in This World

A boy becomes a stillness hardly noticed,
fully up to his imagination, those moments
hiding beneath the surface, and able to vanish
into a trickle.

He’s in his environment studying some flat rocks,
hoping to find a fossilized impression of a fern.

Every object in these woods keeps secrets.

The sky darkens its face,
a quiet following trace evidences of silence,

because the boy has found his father’s loaded gun.

What the boy does next
depends on what the quiet tells him:
how close or far
the distance to the quiet
if he doesn’t have a map.

I wish there was more love in this world
of suddenness and grief. I wish he notices
light remains transient
on this river of troubles
being carried away. I wish he finds assurances
of the reeds whispering,
relax.

I wish the abundance of scents of pine,
calms him about fierce tenderness
of survival. I wish
that fossilized fern teaches him
more love
in this landscape with infinite possibilities.

What the boy does next
depends on what the quiet tells him.

*

Martin Willitts Jr, a retired Librarian that trained Librarians for New York State Public Libraries. He lives in Syracuse, New York. He is an editor for Comstock Review, and he is the judge for the New York State Fair Poetry Competition. He won 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022. His 21 full-length collections include the National Ecological Award winner for “Searching for What You Cannot See” (Hiraeth Press, 2013) and the Blue Light Award 2019, “The Temporary World”. His recent books are “Ethereal Flowers” (Shanti Arts Press, 2023); “Rain Followed Me Home” (Glass Lyre Press, 2023); “Leaving Nothing Behind” (Fernwood Press, 2023); “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” (Shanti Arts Press, 2024); “All Beautiful Things Need Not Fly” (Silver Bowl Press, 2024); “Martin Willitts Jr: Selected Poems” (FutureCycle Press, 2024); and “Love Never Cools When It Is Hot” (Red Wolf Editions, 2025)