--------------------Her Mother's Dying
She told me
her mother's dying
had lasted three weeks,
dropped her face,
smiled,
and said,
"We didn't go to Switzerland
or Haiti
that year
as we'd planned."
Her mother had died, she added,
turned,
and talked
about a new blue dress she'd seen,
and a face in a crowd
she had liked.
She spoke quietly,
while the wind talked incessantly,
like a child who could not hear us
and played.
It was spring,
The white flowers had opened on the trees.
Children sat by the fountain,
not yet filled.
Only the birds seemed to fly away from us,
and to rest, fragile
on their branches.
The City
I do not know where my joy
came from in that city,
from the rats
idling in the daylight
their faces half-intelligent and crude?
From the birds slanting to the trees in the park
in the air that seemed to beg for silence,
its harmony formed by
cars, trucks slamming?
Or from the homeless people,
strangers, some of them,
from distant cities,
who spent their day with bottles,
and stretched to sleep
with half-open eyes
on benches at mid afternoon?
Or from the spring,
the trees with red half-leaves,
the streets thick with people,
from remembering my childhood,
as I could then?
Or from midnight and the resting air?
The cars were gone,
stranger called to stranger
up and down the avenue
as if they were friends.
"Her Mother's Dying" is from her chapbook "The Street Where I Was A Child," and "The City" is from "Departures."
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About the author:
Linda Benninghoff has a MA in English with an Emphasis on Creative Writing from SUNY at Stony Brook. She has published poetry in about 30 journals and anthologies. She translated The Seafarer from the Old English. The translation appears at www.electrato.com