Where Does Sorrow Take You? and Barred, 2 poems by Martha Snell

Where Does Sorrow Take You?

Three of us sprawled on the carpet
aisle six of Barnes and Noble, Self-Help section
after Religion, before Psychology. To my side
a shopping bag of new dresses nestled in black.

We are looking for an atlas, a guide
to where one goes when the father dies,
when a husband’s suddenly gone.
No maps here. Neither in Travel.

We sit closer on this journey than in recent years.
We look into each other’s faces, we listen
without interruption. Between us
there is comfort, there are answers.

Two chairs at dusk overlooking a dark mountain range — *Grief and Beyond* by
Andrew Walker. CC license.

Barred

She arrives in silence

sensation of moving air

barely there, almost

imagined

like a hand brushing the foot

of my bed in darkness.

She lights on a branch

beside my stock-still presence

looks over her shoulder

deep brown saucer eyes

that seem to take me in

that seem to plea

for my silence, my respect

of her domain. She unfolds lifts

spreads her wings, floats to a tree

close by, turns her plumaged head

and eyes me kindly

as if seeking accord.

I sense a nest nearby, brood of eggs

newly hatched – blind naked

gray fluff, open beaks.

I feel tingling in my breasts

reaching, pulling close

her feathered flight in my hair.

In 2015, after a long academic career in education, Martha Snell completed the MFA program in poetry at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poems have appeared in The Poet’s Billow, Streetlight Magazine, Tuck Magazine, on the Live Poet’s Society website and elsewhere. She was selected as a finalist in the 2015 Bermuda Triangle Prize (The Poet’s Billow) and received the Mary Jean Irion Prize from Chautauqua Literary Arts Friends in Chautauqua, New York in August 2015.