August 24th, 2012
Link • Poems, Tributes • 1 Comment
Sarah Pemberton Strong
FISH TANK
My daughter has dropped two slices
of her plum into the fish tank.
The black molly, after circling around,
is nibbling at the sticker I neglected
to remove: Product of Mexico.
I’m on the phone long distance
with my teacher in England,
who suggests I might begin
each session of meditation
(Buddhist, from India) with a bit
of appreciation for my body.
Not for the cleverness
of my fingers, or the back handspring
I could turn at the distant
and limber age of thirteen.
Consider your organs,
he says; the liver, the kidneys,
the spleen, all doing their work
so perfectly together. Right now
that work is taking place
at a kitchen table in Connecticut,
where I’m watching my sweet girl
with her fish, and drinking tea
grown in the Yunnan province of China.
A China that is everywhere,
just as is—my teacher says—compassion.
And I believe him,
though mostly I forget it,
just as I forget the factories
inside me, how they work
throughout the night without pause,
becoming visible
only when something goes wrong,
as the glass wall of the fish bowl
is visible to the fish
only by the green bloom of algae
across it. Through which
my daughter’s eyes and mine
now gaze through the water at
her offering, dropped down
from another world
that is this world.
–from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Tribute to Buddhist Poets
September 7th, 2011
Sarah Pemberton Strong
COLD TEA
Come upon later,
like a dream recalled at lunchtime.
Dark as deep water, bone cold.
Where is she now, the woman
who poured into a white cup?
She was standing on the lip
of the whole river with her plan
when the current called her and she had to
go: answer the knocking
that she in her not-knowing
called interruption.
–from Rattle #34, Winter 2010
March 6th, 2009
Link • Poems • Leave a Comment
Sarah Pemberton Strong
AFTER 75 YEARS, SHE FINALLY GETS ANGRY
At first we did not know what was happening.
The tea on the porch table cooled several degrees
while she stood up, clutched
the scrollwork back of the chair. The lines
on her face arranged themselves in a way
we’d never seen, her nostrils flared
and the bird in the tree behind her stopped
singing. Someone, not me, took
a breath and then we were in it. It
was like a high wind, the way her hair
kicked up. We froze in our wrought
iron seats as from inside the house her pale
drapes sailed out toward us, toward the blackening
sky and the suddenly greenish light, toward
the fury of her gaze that was past
furious, past pale, past any flail of fear
we might fumble out, gesture.
Inside the thinly-wrinkled scent of powder a monster
had been sleeping. Her planted feet, the wings
of her hands, and when she opened the history
of her mouth her unshackled rage. It blew into us,
lodged in us, our throats, and afterward
we never spoke of it. Never, not even to one
another. Struck mute—we, who were witness.
–from Rattle 29, Summer 2008
