after Joy Harjo
Even with piles of dust about our feet, the
dishes in the sink, I know my crooked world
opened your busted heart and yours mine. Everything begins
broken not blessed. And us, admonished against another go at
love, dealing from a second-hand deck, a
fun-house mirror of mistakes, we stocked a kitchen
cabinet full of salves and solutions, wrote a different table
of contents, medicinal lessons in mending. What we know
is one day dark throats of tulips open to spring sun no matter
fear of frost and the next maples are marled autumn red. What
we know of absolutions sponged beneath our knees, their weight:
memories combust, children turn the path, parents tire and fade. They must.
We no longer overindulge in words like duty or shame or let them eat
us like hungry brown sparrows. We were ready, or nearly so, when we met, to
love the scent of another flower opening, to keep it alive.
Karen Elizabeth Sharpe is from Rutland, Massachusetts, where she lives with her partner and two pandemic rescue dogs. Karen is the author of Prayer Can Be Anything, (Finishing Line Press) and This Late Afternoon (Dunn & Co.), is a poetry editor at The Worcester Review, and a member of the National Baseball Poetry Festival executive committee. Her poems have or will soon appear in SWWIM, Whale Road Review, The MacGuffin, The Comstock Review, On The Seawall, among others.