Tag: funeral

Two Poems by Todd Wynn

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

A Quiet Kind of Violence

Reason combs through wreckage
looking for order
where none exists.

Reason has never bled,
never slept in chairs
beside a diagnosis,
planned a funeral
like shopping from a catalog.

A soft word, reason
like fate, used to explain
the pain of others—
never its own.

The sky stills.
The world collapses
with no lesson
carved into the aftermath.
Just whispers from
those untouched by tragedy:

“It all happens for a reason.”

* 

Her Sky

I sit next to her bed.
Machines powered down—
failed saviors turned spectators
shoved in the corner.
I squeeze a hand
that can’t squeeze back
as goodbye splinters
behind my teeth.
I stare through a window
as if the sky has answers.

Her sky—
wrung out and trembling—
holds ash like an urn
until it fractures,
spilling embered hues
into the hush.
The sun falls—
a funeral at noon.

*

Todd Wynn is a pediatric nurse living in Mansfield, Ohio. He recently began writing poetry as a way of working through past grief and understanding how that has shaped the way he sees the world around him. His work has previously appeared in ONE ART.

Jimmy Carter Brought to the Capitol to Lie In State by Christine Potter

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment
Jimmy Carter Brought to the Capitol to Lie In State
Wind yesterday, wind again today, strong enough to rock
the thick, shaggy trunks of cedars. Dead leaves and bits of
paper rise in what sounds like surf—but no water. Sky’s a
mean blue beyond the jangled, empty maples. Too bright
and cold. Cold wind. Shuffle-click of military shoes, body-
bearers strapping the President’s casket covered with our
flag to a black caisson. The horses’ black necks curled like
question marks in the white sun. Someone gravel-voiced
huffing orders. More wind. Hoof-clatter, columns, stone
steps, a distant siren, an almost recognizable word caught
in the air, held aloft until it’s gone. One horse, riderless,
waving its head. The first President I had been old enough
to vote for. His voice on the old-even-then black and white
TV I’d repaired by replacing tubes. His serious Oval Office
camera-gaze, our sweet old world: blurry, glimmering. We
paid for things with coins. We didn’t want war but hadn’t
won one recently. My father was out of work. Me, too. Dad
and I drove to Unemployment together. Dad still liked him;
a President is a seat at the dinner table. How could we know
the future and how distant it never was? The year I was born,
Jimmy Carter entered a melting-down nuclear reactor and
repaired it, absorbing an entire year’s worth of radiation in
ninety seconds. He lived a century. Everything you’d never
imagine happened. I never thought I’d cry for two whole days.
*
Christine Potter is the poetry editor of Eclectica Magazine. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Rattle Poets Respond, Eclectica, ONE ART, Tar River Poetry, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, The McNeese Review, Grain, and Consequence. Her full-length poetry collection, Unforgetting, is published by Kelsay Books and her time traveling young adult novels, The Bean Books, are on Evernight Teen. She lives in a very old house in the Hudson Valley with her husband and a chonky cat named Bella.