Nancy Jentsch, this month’s respondent to Three Questions, shares “Scratched and Chipped,” a poem about a beloved rocking horse that her mother asked her to part with during a family move, while novelist and poet Kathy Wade contributes “Meeting Debby,” a poem in response to last month’s dispatch, “I Go Before You.”
Scratched and Chipped
Upstairs she plays fantasy games
with stuffies, while her rocking horse’s
springs rust in the basement.
After lunch, her mother walks her down
cellar’s steps, talks of their move
and of a new home for the adored horse—
one where children born blind
would stroke and love away the rust.
Agreement is tearful, memory seared.
The girl turned grandma switches
on her cellar light, sees shelves
layered with puzzles and games,
scratches and chipped paint no longer
being loved away, serving no rational
purpose. Is she fighting reason
by holding on to toys, clinging to days
when mothers could still love
away scrapes and falls?
–Nancy Jentsch
Meeting Debby
Every day I miss you, touch your picture
and ask how you’re doing.
“I’m not leaving you,” you’d promised,
once we gave ourselves over to the grim diagnosis,
during the year I sat by your bedside
or whispered with you in late-night phone calls.
“I know I’m going away,” you’d repeat,
“but I’m not leaving you.”
Little sister, I took you at your word.
Three years since your passing,
from time to time you show me what it’s like
to be on the other side, to be free of this body,
to soar, no limits, no fears, no doubts.
Sometimes a rainbow.
A red-tailed hawk at sunset. Even a pelican
who lingered near the shore, silently staring at me.
Once, in the Omnimax theater, I watched
the curved-screened cinema of the
James Webb Telescope take us inside a black hole.
Billions of new stars, constellations swirled in space,
vast and sparkling, beyond belief.
“Oh!” I found myself saying,
“so that’s where you are!
So that’s how it is!”
“Yes!” you laughed.
Even as a child you seemed
born for fun,
delight,
imagining the outer limits.
I should have known.
–Kathy Wade
Top Image: Pixabay/Alicja
Second Image: Pixabay/StockSnap
Side bar image: Pixabay/Sabine van Erp
