JANUARY 1, 2022

by Susan Delaney Spear

Aboard a Colorado National Guard helicopter, Gov. Jared Polis on Friday, Dec. 31, 2021, gets a flyover tour of Boulder County neighborhoods destroyed by wildfires the previous day. He was accompanied by Brig. Gen. Laura Clellan, Adjutant General of Colorado, and Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle. Colorado U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and Rep. Joe Neguse also toured the area in a separate helicopter. (POOL: Hart Van Den Burg, CPR) —The Colorado Sun, January 1, 2022

Drop into this darkness.

A first-born charcoal sky

and fire-scorched land

smolder yet remain.

 

Today the sun’s detained.

A sparrow pecks

a pile of ashen snow

for sustenance.

.

Drop into this darkness.

Dig deep.

Light the wick within.

Let this year begin.

 

 

Susan Delaney Spear is an Associate Professor of English at Colorado Christian University in Lakewood. Her poetry collection Beyond All Bearing was published by Wipf & Stock in 2018.

CLOUD BURST

by Susan Delaney Spear

“Heavy Rain in the City,” a painting by Dan Haraga.

“Sad news this morning”
reads my daughter’s text,
“Ravi passed last night.”
Ravi, whom I’ve never met.

How to grieve a man
that I have never met
and now will never meet?
I find myself beset

by this amorphous loss.
He would have been
her uncle by marriage—
but for COVID-19.

The weather report predicted
a stiff fifty degrees,
so I decide to run
to feel the angry breeze.

I think I’ll beat the downpour
and quickly change my clothes.
A mile out the wind whips hard,
and the rain’s a drumming prose.                                  

I pass a Starbucks and notice
the vacant dining area.
Oddly, I think of Elijah,
transported to heaven by chariot.

But Ravi’s death was not
a smooth heavenward glide.
COVID victims wrestle death
with no one by their side.

At two miles out, too late to turn
around, large drops pelt
my legs, my bare forearms,
and the unforgiving asphalt.

The water rushes in gutters.
I plunge through its freezing foam.
Drops weep from the brim of my cap.
Run. Three miles from home.

I picture a deluge of faces,    
a flood of decimation,
one hundred fifty thousand plus,
the size of a small nation.

My shirt plasters my ribs.
My shoes and socks—drowned.
Numbness creeps from thumb to elbow.
Run. The storm pounds.

As I fumble for my key,
I say his name aloud: “Ravi”  
One by one they die,
this unspeakable enormity.


Susan Delaney Spear is an Associate Professor of English at Colorado Christian University in Lakewood. She is the author of Beyond All Bearing (Wipf & Stock Resource Publications 2018), a collection of poems, and the co-author of The Secrets of English Verse (forthcoming from Spring in November, 2020, with David J. Rothman) a creative writing textbook aimed at advanced high school students and undergraduates.