Tag: Judith Harris

One Poem by Judith Harris

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My Mother’s Grave

Now, when the cold
rain flows, I worry about it
touching her grave,

how many years it will take
to close up that suture.

My mother’s heart is buried
under sycamore leaves
covering the words
engraved on her plaque.

I can still feel the nails
of the gardener’s rake
scraping the “B”
in Beloved.

*

Judith Harris is the author of The Bad Secret and Atonement (LSU Press) Night Garden (Tiger Bark Press), and Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self through Writing (SUNY Press). Her poems have been published in The Nation, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Hudson Review, Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, the syndicated newspaper column, American Life in Poetry, and Poetry Daily and Poem of the Day from The Poetry Foundation and on NPR. She is currently at work on a new book of literary criticism, The Poetry of Loss: Romantic and Contemporary Elegies (Routledge Press) to be published next year.

Two Poems by Judith Harris

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Magnolia in the Backyard

Lately, I have come to regard
its blossoms
white as bone china saucers,
its star shaped petals
arrayed on the upper shelves,

and when it sways, I can hear
the hardness of its breath
as its broad leaves clap, stiff
and polished with a shiny wax,
so that if I hold one up

that has already fallen, I can almost
make out my own reflection—
my whole life story somehow
written there.

*

Early Snowfall Just After Dark

Snow covers the fields
with a white field of its own,
whiter and more flawless
than crystals of salt,

or a slow-moving river of ice,

the leafy fir trees, now
wrapped inside
white shawls fringed with frost,

snow dusting the feathers of
a spotted thrush, and filling the air
with stacks and stacks
of forgotten moonlight.

*

Judith Harris is the author of The Bad Secret and Atonement (LSU Press) Night Garden (Tiger Bark Press), and Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self through Writing (SUNY Press). Her poems have been published in The Nation, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Hudson Review, Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, the syndicated newspaper column, American Life in Poetry, and Poetry Daily and Poem of the Day from The Poetry Foundation and on NPR. She is currently at work on a new book of literary criticism, The Poetry of Loss: Romantic and Contemporary Elegies (Routledge Press) to be published next year.

Learning Arithmetic in First Grade by Judith Harris

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Learning Arithmetic in First Grade

Across the window pane
of my study, the woody vines
of the Boston Creepers
cling tight to the masonry
like beads on an abacus’ string.

As I look closer, I’m reminded
of how I learned to count
by methodically moving each bead

as a day to the side, counting
to myself another day over,

then putting my head on my desk
for a nap, and leaving the rest
for tomorrow.

*

Judith Harris is the author of The Bad Secret and Atonement (LSU Press) Night Garden (Tiger Bark Press), and Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self through Writing (SUNY Press). Her poems have been published in The Nation, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Hudson Review, Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, the syndicated newspaper column, American Life in Poetry, and Poetry Daily and Poem of the Day from The Poetry Foundation and on NPR. She is currently at work on a new book of literary criticism, The Poetry of Loss: Romantic and Contemporary Elegies (Routledge Press) to be published next year.