Poetry | December 01, 2010
Poetry Feature: Maria Hummel
Maria Hummel
Featuring the poems:
- Twelve red seeds (featured as Poem of the Week, Feb. 23, 2011)
- Long hospital
- White houses
- What to say
- Changeling
Twelve red seeds
Twelve red stains
on the sidewalk. Twelve suns
at the edge of a picture,
each colored the wrong bright shade.
Something will come to lick them up:
the earthworm dying on its way
to the garden, a sluggish
skunk, the soapy brush of a mother
who does not want her son to ask
whose or why. Briefly, she wonders
if the blood is hers.
She has a hole in her side
she probes when no one is looking
to feel if it still pains her. It does. It will
not heal. It will not kill her.
Her boy is beautiful and ill.
She can no longer see the days
when she washed his body
and thought it perfect, gossamer,
blue-threaded,
his small fist closing
around the root of her finger
in an unbreakable ring.
Yet she wants to teach him
so many things: Look at these Os
blurred to blots, these tears
of the sad, red giant!
Look at these stars, starry nights, star pins, star fish.
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