Summer Home Review

Empty House

The pink kitchen cabinets stand
with their mouths open.

Bedrooms, once full of children,
inhabited by ghosts of furniture
outlined on the wallpaper.

Hallways, the temporary province of spiders.

In the living room
the sun probes hollow
through filmy windowpanes.

Chairmarks on the wide pine floorboards
like the dimples of a hammer
from a careless carpenter,

On the piano,
pushed up against the wall
a metronome pleads
for the touch of a finger

Sue Roberts

Poem for the Children I Will Never Give Birth To

I will never know you, feel your pull and tug,
the soft mantle of your heads against me.

You will never drop eggs, whose puzzles you ask me
to explain; there will be no messes to sponge from the floor.

I will not hear you shift at night, turning beneath sheets you picked
out, the ones I wouldn’t have chosen but you claimed you had to have.

I will not fold your clothes or arrange the books you’ve spilled
on the carpet, or move your bicycles from behind the car in the drive.

I will never sit in the second row of your grammar school auditorium
waiting to register your three-line speech with a flash.

Does this yearning, this inner gulf, want a child to fill it?
Would my dangerous darknesses recede if I put a child at the center?

I will have to understand the choices I’ve made,
which did not include you, although I’ve dreamed of you often.

I hope you will forgive my solitary life, the one I morticed
from pain and grief, the one I struggled to build and have grown to love.

It is not that I was unwilling to know you; it was simply easier,
in a world of so many hungry mouths, to feed only my own,

holding my heart like a small bird against the storm.
It was all I could do, and it is enough.

Dianne Ouellette

Sinner in the Hands

I performed an act of contrition every day.
Bored with God stories, I thought of them as Nancy Drew mysteries:
The Secret of the Lost Temple,
The Mysterious Burning Bush.
Sister Mary Francis sent me to Mother Superior;
ah, another student to mete out acts of Hail Marys.
Kneel here, she said;
I touched the green velvet hand rest.
I was not alone in that place;
He looked down from every corner,
I spoke to him,
gave him a litany of my joy.
At Easter, crawling with the other 7-year-old sinners,
I believed I was the queen
captured by the devil himself...
by my muteness I would save my people.
God was in me then;
I’ve never been holier.
I was compelled to believe,
yet silenced by disbelief.
Every time I spoke,
the good nun said to stand in the corner,
arms above my head.
My arms became strong.
I learned to tell stories.
The plots were thin at first,
but I learned the craft,
the art,
thanks be to God.