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My Mother Says There’s Beauty Even in the Midst of Loss
but I am no longer listening, I am no longer looking
out of the car window & into the outside & all
its flowers, cheap party favors stacked up at the funeral
that the world is. As if a violet were God’s sign
that pain will be worth it someday. As if
on that someday God will make it all worthwhile,
living in a world where worth is based on pain.
If I could make the trees listen. If I could make them
understand, make them throw down their leaves & raise
arms bare as any human agony to the sky where
my mother says God is, where God stuffs his pockets
with our prayers like he’s hoarding candy, where sometimes
he unwraps a wish & decides that his answer is no.
It hurts me more than it makes me angry, the trees’
insistence on green. And after all beauty is nothing
like reason, nothing like a reason to believe the things we cannot
change are the things we have to accept. My mother drives,
the car moves over the asphalt some city put down to pave a way,
to roll its people forward despite what the ground had to say,
& above the sky gathers its blues like the face of a boy
refusing to breathe until he gets his way.
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Emma Bolden is the author of a memoir, The Tiger and the Cage (Soft Skull Press), and the poetry collections House Is an Enigma (Southeast Missouri State University Press), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press), and Maleficae (GenPop Books). The recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA, her work has appeared in The Norton Introduction to Literature, The Best American Poetry, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and such journals as Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, the Bennington Review, and Shenandoah. She currently serves as an editor of Screen Door Review.
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The Wizard tree, Cathedral Woods, Intervale, N.H. 1900.