Like The Sky I've Been Too Quiet
I sit in the forbidden room a chair by your bed
holding my weight in stones, in sorrows
in uncountable grains of touch you can still
speak so I lean over to catch your words in
my mouth to swallow these word bits
warm in beak and you tell me I was
always the quiet one and you don’t know
about all the words layered in me like rotting
leaves so many things I have said inside
the cavern of my chest full of the screeching
of nervous bats flitting around while the
things I don’t say pile up light cuts across
your blankets and I am afraid to touch you
because you are a pillar of pain now and
this is the bad thing this is the moment I
remember and write over and over and over
always that light and my own body screaming
from every rivet I promise now to go over
the years to scratch the earth of your love
for me to erect those landscapes eclipses
rays shimmering like milk in sky so I
say but this poem goes down the same
mournful path and out the window
blackbirds have come to eat what I have
scattered blurred and foggy ground
holding my weight in stones, in sorrows
in uncountable grains of touch you can still
speak so I lean over to catch your words in
my mouth to swallow these word bits
warm in beak and you tell me I was
always the quiet one and you don’t know
about all the words layered in me like rotting
leaves so many things I have said inside
the cavern of my chest full of the screeching
of nervous bats flitting around while the
things I don’t say pile up light cuts across
your blankets and I am afraid to touch you
because you are a pillar of pain now and
this is the bad thing this is the moment I
remember and write over and over and over
always that light and my own body screaming
from every rivet I promise now to go over
the years to scratch the earth of your love
for me to erect those landscapes eclipses
rays shimmering like milk in sky so I
say but this poem goes down the same
mournful path and out the window
blackbirds have come to eat what I have
scattered blurred and foggy ground
Judy Kaber recently retired after 34 years teaching elementary school. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals, both print and online, including Atlanta Review, december, The Comstock Review, Tar River, and Spillway. Her contest credits include the Maine Postmark Poetry Contest, the Larry Kramer Memorial Chapbook Contest, and second place in the 2016 Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Contest.
The poem’s title is from Kaveh Akbar’s “Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Inpatient).” One of the few things my mother said to me as she lay dying was how quiet I always was. That moment is one I come back to again and again in many poems.
The poem’s title is from Kaveh Akbar’s “Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Inpatient).” One of the few things my mother said to me as she lay dying was how quiet I always was. That moment is one I come back to again and again in many poems.