by Lynne Schilling
after “I Want to Love the World” by Christine Potter
I want to love waking up again, but for months
I’ve been waking up to thoughts of being a day
closer to death, to images of the bony ribcages
of starving children, to the blankness of hope.
I want to be light as birdsong at dawn, but instead,
I am the heavy keening of families of deportees.
I want to love waking up, but joy evades my grip,
drips off my fingers and evaporates, like drops
of water on a hot pan. I want to wake up happy,
but doom is leaning on her horn under my window,
making thoughts of anything else impossible. I force
myself to get up, and only then, when I feel my feet
on the floor, do I remember poetry—a few lines
I want to revise, a poem I want to reread & that
is enough to get me down the stairs to my coffee.
While Lynne Schilling has been writing poetry on and off for forty years, she began writing it seriously four years ago at age 75. Her day job was as an academic in an entirely different field. She has published poems in Quartet, The Alchemy Spoon, Rue Scribe, The New Verse News and others. She has poems forthcoming in Lucky Jefferson and MacQueen’s Quinterly.
