Tag: memorial

Icarus by Ellen Rowland

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Icarus
                   After Bryony Littlefair

When you feel better from this someday— and you will— you’ll stop blaming the sun. A wide morning ray will slant through the window, turning rain spots to sequins, and you’ll name the colors. The million greens of the tree line will seem sharper against the white sky. You’ll feel the comfort of the cat against your back and the weight of the blanket in blessed sleep, the scald and steam of shower as it wakes you to skin. You’ll lay out a proper breakfast, open the bright bergamot jam, spread it with a shiny spoon. And you’ll taste again. You’ll taste sun. In the play of light, you’ll see two guitars on the wall—one wooden, the other its shadow—each beautiful. Though there is still no music, there is the memory of a strum. Not that any of this will rewind the fall or heal the distance, but maybe the dust motes suspended in light will dance slowly enough for you to forget, even for a moment, that he had no wings.

*

Ellen Rowland is a writer and editor who leads small, generative poetry workshops on craft and form. She is the author of two collections of haiku and a bi-lingual book of haiku and tanka. You can find her writing in places like One Art, Sheila-Na-Gig, Braided Way, Humana Obscura, and several anthologies, including “The Path to Kindness” and “The Wonder of Small Things” edited by James Crews. Her full-length poetry collections include No Small Thing (Fernwood Press 2023) and In Search of Lost Birds, recently published by Kelsay Books. She lives off the grid with her family on a small farm in Greece. Connect with her on Instagram , Facebook, and Substack.

Three Poems by Martin Willitts Jr

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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)

When I Look Up at the Sky, My Eyes on Your Grave by Elly Katz

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When I Look Up at the Sky, My Eyes on Your Grave
For Daniella Moffson, killed at age 21 in a bus crash
after volunteering with Columbia’s Global Brigades in Honduras.
As in life, her legacy illuminates her giving nature.
Your death runs through me like my stroke;
whomever I become silhouettes in your color.
I am the world’s smallest stone.
Out the window, a sparrow the size of a pull tab.
He dispatches a message— all this loss, and you hanker for more nectar?
I am in a graveyard surrounded by words of pebbles.
Who would you have been beyond 2016, Daniella Moffson?
An esteemed oncologist? A beloved wife? A spider spinning silk to nowhere?
The cerulean at her temples once blossom, now wilt.
My eyes a fog of feeling.
*
At 27, verging towards a doctorate at Harvard, Elly Katz went for a mundane procedure to stabilize her neck. Somehow, she survived what doctors surmised was unsurvivable: a brainstem stroke secondary to a physician’s needle misplacement. In the wake of the tragedy, she discovered the power of dictation and the bounty of metaphor. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Stardust Review, the Sacramento Literary Review, the Amsterdam Review, and many others. Her first collection of creative nonfiction, From Scientist to Stroke Survivor: Life Redacted is forthcoming from Lived Places Publishing in Disability Studies (2025). Her first collection of poetry, Instructions for Selling-Off Grief, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books (2025).

Memorial to Scarcity by Jennifer Mills Kerr

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Memorial to Scarcity

I keep a whisky bottle inside the cupboard,
depleted except for a tiny bit, the golden
liquid glimmering, a magical snake
caught within glass. So little left.

This scarcity, a memorial to my mother,
one I visit, tilting the bottle back and forth,
remembering our vacant conversations.
My mother loved whisky, but what I have
would never be enough–she always made
sure to tell me that. The scant amount I keep,
a reminder of her endless thirst, circling
our days, a hissing snake, poisonous,
striking the soft spots until they hardened
into rock.

Now that I’m sober, this creature slithers
safely behind glass–
look how it sheds its skin, a frayed memory,
paper thin. Look how it eats its own tail,
a life holding emptiness, zero, always
the place to begin.

*

Jennifer Mills Kerr loves mild winters, anything Jane Austen, and the raucous coast of Northern California. She leads virtual creative writing & reading groups for poets. After twenty years publishing fiction, she has recently “come out” as a poet, thanks to encouraging friends and editors. Say hello at www.JenniferMillsKerr.com.