Pantoum for a Friend in Pain
It doesn’t have to happen in a day.
Slowly clouds disperse, the snow melts.
Tomorrow brings a sun you’ve never seen.
The Earth begs for feet to touch its dirt.
Slowly clouds disperse, the snow melts
into your skin. A sun goes by, a moon.
The Earth turns its dirt under your feet.
The grief settles like a soft, wet haze.
The sun warms your skin for the moon’s kiss.
You shed a broken year, then five, then ten.
The grief evaporates like morning fog,
leaving its sheen of dew. Now you can see
the road in front of you, twenty years, fifty.
Tomorrow, with a sun you couldn’t know,
ignites a field of dew. Now you can see.
It doesn’t have to happen in a day.
***
Wow!
after Kenneth Patchen
What a beautiful night! The breeze’s
long, gentle fingers and the salted sky!
Look, the moon’s eye is almost open!
The clouds are whales in a wide sea!
The earth is made of stars, but I am
made of earth! The quiet is crisp!
What a delicious smell, the pheromones
of flowers! What a generous song,
the evening’s blue harp! I am alive,
can’t you tell? My body has mapped
44 years! My feet have left 100,000,000
prints! Yet each step is still new, new, new!
Eric Raanan Fischman‘s first book, “Mordy Gets Enlightened,” was published through The Little Door in 2017 and reissued by Turnsol Editions in 2021. His work has appeared locally in Bombay Gin, Denver Quarterly, Twenty Bellows, Tiny Spoon, New Feathers Anthology, South Broadway Ghost Society, Mountain Bluebird Magazine, and the Boulder Weekly newspaper. He was one of two winners of DQ’s 2023 Poetry Broadside Competition, with 60 copies letterpressed. He has taught for a variety of Colorado-based organizations, including Crestone Poemfest, Beyond Academia Free Skool, and the Firehouse Arts Center. He currently curates the Boulder/Denver metro area poetry calendar at boulderpoetryscene.com.