Riversong

Photo © 2024 Jennifer Wagner

 

From the watchtower

I saw them, wildflowers

drifting downstream.

 

I followed on foot, from loamy bank

to bank, and found you

in that neglected canoe

 

—you’d chased them, too,

with my heart,

a padlock you’d rescued

 

for pennies on the dollar,

and handed it back to me,

warm, and melting like wax.

 

I’d never been able

to find the key,

but you unlocked it

 

with a poem in Latin,

so haunted, so beautiful,

and unchained all my wildflower tears.

 

 

© 2024 Jennifer Wagner

 

 

Shay's Word Garden Word List 

dVerse OLN

Teddy-bear Cholla

 

Out in the desert,

where you left me,

I turned to cholla.

 

I looked soft to touch,

but anyone who tried

got the wicked barb

you left behind.

 

I crawled my way

across México,

not once,

but twice—

 

where nurses

exchanged the sweet mints

in my purse

to meds.

 

I fled,

and found myself again—

peering into the

the dark, dewy eyes

of children

selling chicle

on dirt roads

near the freeway

where the poems lay.

 

I gave all my money, eagerly,

into their beautiful brown hands.

 

Now, the dive bar,

turned used bookstore,

holds my chair

with a well-read copy of

The Captain’s Verses—

 

my pirate saying,

pull up, mi rama robada,

 

I’m buying.

 

 

© 2024 Jennifer Wagner

 

Teddy-bear cholla has a soft, cuddly appearance, but is quite a prickly cactus.

“rama robada” is a reference to Pablo Neruda’s poem, “La Rama Robada” (“The Stolen Branch”) in The Captain’s Verses.

 

For Fireblossom’s Word Garden

and

dverse Poetics:  Left in the Lurch