Patty Dickson Piezcka
Our Voices
were vines steeped in honeysuckle,
so intertwined my words
came from your mouth
before I finished thinking them.
Your voice lived in my mind,
grew from seeds into
an endless, jasmine-wild jungle.
This morning, I found
one of your sentences dropped —
stones on pavement, meanings crumbled,
crushed beneath passing feet.
My voice, hollow as a throaty reed,
is the sound the moon makes
when it peels back its skin.
Another Year
The old year turns its back
on me, rolls over in bed, pulls
our blanket of warm-woven days
with it while I wait,
wrapped in a sheet of chills.
Next year’s shadow lurks
behind the final page
of the wall calendar.
Cold-fingered shapes escape,
brittle-cracked and cobbed,
holding pillows
over the mouth of memory
in time’s weft and warp,
smothering laughter
and sun-silken mornings.
A Drink from the Root
Stir this dwindling twilight
until trees have visions.
Let me drink
from their deep roots,
dark, musky elixir
from the earth. To see
the hidden, the true purpose.
To know why one tree
slowly dies, held upright
by another’s limbs,
protected from storms.
How the leaning tree somehow
helps nourish
the one left standing, how
when one falls, it takes
part of the other with it.
As your limbs
bend my branches,
dawn has a mouthful of silence and
morning forgets to ripen.
Patty Dickson Pieczka’s second book of poetry, Painting the Egret's Echo, won the Library of Poetry Book Award for 2012 from The Bitter Oleander Press. Other books are Lacing Through Time (Bellowing Ark Press, 2011), and a chapbook, Word Paintings (Snark Publishing, 2002). In both the 2012 ISPS contest and the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest, she placed first and has had writing contributions in more than fifty literary journals. She graduated from the creative writing program at Southern Illinois University. Her short play won first prize from the Paradise Alley Players, and she received first place in the fiction contest at John A. Logan College.