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Barbara Crooker

The thick syrup of birdsong pours over our heads,
and the afternoon drowses in the heat. Only the butterflies
are industrious, skipping from the foxgloves to roses
the color of old bricks. Even in her wheelchair,
my mother is still surprised when she sees one pink waterlily

rising out of the mud in the koi pond. When I push her past
it on the way back, she gets surprised all over again. I pick
her a dandelion; it smells of nothing but summer. Later,
when it goes to seed, we will make a wish before our breath
sends its parachutes spinning across the lawn. I think about
her last mammogram, the clusters of nebulae, and the black
hole where cancer’s random toss planted its seed. Out in the grass,
the dandelions spread their thin spatulate leaves, dig their tough
roots deeper, ready for any weather.

 

 

Barbara Crooker has published poems in magazines such as Christianity and Literature, the Christian Science Monitor, the Christian Century, Tiferet, Sojourners, Windhover, Literature and Belief, America, Rock and Sling, Radix, Relief, the Anglican Theologic Review, and the Cresset. She has also published two collections, Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First Book Award and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize, and Line Dance, published in 2008 by Word Press. In 2003, she received the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award (Stanley Kunitz, judge). She lives and writes in rural northeastern Pennsylvania with her husband and twenty-year-old son, who has autism. Two daughters are grown, and she has one adorable grandson.

 
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