Patty Dickson Pieczka
All I Wanted
flew so close
it kissed my fingertips.
No gradual slipping,
cell by cell,
but this sudden shadow,
crushing the day.
Hope drops through nets,
its weight sinks, bubbling
to blue-green depths.
Night brings
the moon's breath,
warm and soft, sleeping,
unaware that my dream,
tangled in seaweed,
reaches toward silver.
An oak, in the ancient glow,
weaves wind into words,
threads the sky with tales
of loss, of regret.
Claws of gnarled branches
crack the moon.
Why Write?
To gaze into the face of paper
until you see time’s eye
staring back and read
ancient hieroglyphs scrawled
across its iris.
To turn ink into fire,
a crackle of twigs
smoking signals
down a shaded pathway
lost in the woods.
To let ink be black creek water,
spilling over stones
until it craves speech.
To make violets sprout
from a plain white page.
To fill the room with
the scent of honeysuckle,
roses, cinnamon rolls
baking in the morning.
To shred the page
into small pieces,
throw them overhead and watch
fifty white butterflies
flutter through the house.
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.