Patty Dickson Pieczka
Song For a Missing Year
As our lives hang at half-mast
these plague-eaten months,
hungry hours chew themselves,
fold their shreds into months
until day and night are estranged,
and even shadows are confused.
Remove the noose
from the day’s throat
and let our bashed hearts
and broken hands
heal until our fingers
pluck music
over these hills,
and our city’s bruised streets
breathe deeply
to sing the next note.
Hidden Music
There is only
this ghost-filled wind playing across
the flute’s mouthpiece —
a snake’s rattle.
I’ve lost the melody
that translates blackbirds
and plays the colors sunrise turns
while night packs its bags to leave,
plays truth rising from earth's marrow,
the sound that heals bandaged souls
and carries us to a place
soft as a held hand.
Argument
My words try to walk to you
but splinter to the floor.
Your voice bristles
through wired air.
The sound scrubs past,
scratches my skin,
fills me with shadow.
I catch a barbed word,
crack it open
to find its seed —
this sparkling prism
of tear.
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.