WHO WILL BE LEFT

by Carol Alena Aronoff

when hands steepled in prayer 

open 

bloodstained palms 

in a last gesture 

to smoke-filled sky?

When ashes 

cover newly dug graves 

unfindable 

by those who wish 

a final goodbye 

before they flee?

Who will gather 

broken dolls 

to hold a funeral 

for childhood?

Cover the ears 

of shell-shocked 

dogs 

as their owners 

carry them?

Collect tears 

from empty bullet-

scarred wells? 

Grow sunflowers 

from torn limbs

and copper jackets?

Who will be left 

to push grandmothers 

in wheelbarrows 

nowhere safe?

Who?

Carol Alena Aronoff, Ph.D. is a psychologist, teacher and poet. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and won several prizes. She was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Carol has published 4 chapbooks (Cornsilk, Tapestry of Secrets, Going Nowhere in the Time of Corona, A Time to Listen) and 6 full-length poetry collections: The Nature of Music, Cornsilk, Her Soup Made the Moon Weep, Blessings From an Unseen World, Dreaming Earth’s Body (with artist Betsie Miller-Kusz) as well as The Gift of Not Finding: Poems for Meditation. Currently, she resides in rural Hawaii.

ENDURANCE

by Martha Deed

" ...the appearance of Odessa is very handsome, the harbor is excellent."

—Capt. Seth F. Sprague, Smyrna log, July 15, 1830.

He whistles “Yellow Submarine” as he passes by my window.

He is pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with large blocks of broken concrete.

Studied music in college, he tells me later. Now this (with a smile).

When they found the Endurance in 10,000 ft of water

videoed the stern still bright in red and gold, did they think

about the men who did not die there, but who now are long dead

or about what those seamen thought making their escape

across the living ice mindlessly crushing their ship, did that crew

have the peace of mind to consider the irony

of a shipwreck with no fatalities, the lifeboat journey

across a frigid ocean, the self-rescues, the endurance?

The digging continues—the rescue of a room less carefully

constructed than Shackleton's barquentine, the room

that did not endure, the room that is a small matter

in the universe although important to me, that may not

last 106 more years even if not sunk again, even if built

right this time like the shipbuilders of Marshfield

built the Smyrna, whose captain logged its voyage to Odessa,

the first American ship to anchor there in 1830,

the crew of 27 with a 5th cousin (6x removed) who

departed this life in 1887, said to be most proud

of the Mayflower ancestors that bind us into cousinhood,

could not have anticipated Putin's carnage in 2022.

All day, the wheelbarrows roll over wooden panels

laid across the spring mud yard from street to dig—

the thin young man with long black beard

now whistling the theme to Star Wars.

Martha Deed's poetry has appeared in The New Verse News and most recently in Moss Trill, Mason Street Blog, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Grand Little Things, The Skinny Poetry Journal.  Her poetry collections Under the Rock (2019) and Climate Change (2014) were both published by FootHills Publishing. She is a retired psychologist who makes trouble with poetry inspired by crises and other mishaps around her house on the Erie Canal in Western New York.