Three poems

By Katie Boord

Going Back

“I’ll go back someday.”

But isn’t that what they all say?

Don’t they all remember shivering stars

And cloudy darkness only children see?

I’d like to be different –

They never go back

But I still know when the juncos return

And I feel the rough wood of a shovel

In the reluctant hands of a woman

Who was once a child.

I remember smoky sweet syrup

In mugs around the maple grove

I remember the path to the forest pond

And every hidden goose nest.

Is that enough to bring me back?

Grackles

Cold is bone-deep

Every cell within me agreeing

It must be so –

It is winter. And the cold is my body

Remembering where it came from.

The earth freezes to better crack open

Waiting for us to return

To sleep and slow decay

The death of nature throws our life

In our cold, pale faces.

The sole survivors of the season

Until the flocks of grackles cover farm fields

To remind us in their creaking, murmuring masses

That we can’t escape life, even in death

Even when we have no use for it

We breathe in, our lungs knowing better than the rest of us. 

Damselflies

We like to think hope is out there, waiting

To be found, lying dormant and alone

Like a lump of gold ore beneath a shelf of shale

In a creek that I walk by every day

Just to watch the damselflies.

But that’s not where it lives.

Hope lives in “see you later”

In “I can’t today, let’s do Monday”

Always knowing we could die today –

Tomorrow, if we’re lucky –

But feeling in our bones the sound of the creek

Where the damselflies hatch from unseen eggs

Already knowing their unique dance.

We don’t look for it, but we find it

Our own dance, alone and together

Human always, all the same.

Katie Boord is an emerging poet from Kansas. She works in a geology lab by day, and sings in an indie rock band by night. Her poems have been published in Heart of Flesh Literary Journal and Poetry Super Highway.