LANDLUBBER IN LOVE
I smelled the sea today!
The aroma of salt-crusted roses,
of mother-of-pearl, of adventure,
shared its romance
unwillingly
with
one who is
no part of it.
YOU KNOW THEM AS WELL AS I DO
I never was a woman who could
fling a hank of lustrous hair over her right
shoulder to punctuate declarative
sentences, or one who appears fragile
and small when crying.
Those glossy women have the edge
in life, while the rest of us struggle
against the odds, groping for words
to fling, words that seldom have the
texture of silk or the immediacy of a
gracefully executed feminine gesture.
And when we cry
oh, when we cry, our bodies grow
steel-like and huge, our blotched faces
contort, and our discordant sobs
reverberate even unto three generations.
— by Ann Applegarth
Copyright ©2010 by Ann Applegarth. All Rights Reserved.
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Ann Applegarth was awarded an Academy of American Poets prize at the University of New Mexico in 1980, and her work has appeared in publications such as West Wind Review, Bellowing Ark, Sin Fron teras, The Cresset, St. Anthony Messenger, Christianity & Literature, and the anthologies Shadow and Light; Literature and the Life of Faith and Earth ships; A New Mecca Poetry Collection. She lives, writes, and administers an annual all-schools poetry contest in Roswell, New Mexico, where she is also poet-in-residence for the High Plains Writing Project at Eastern New Mexico University-Roswell.