Pauletta Hansel
Pauletta Hansel’s tenth poetry collection is Will There Also Be Singing? (Shadelandhouse Modern Press, 2024), poems of witness and protest. Heartbreak Tree (Madville Publications, 2022) won the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Book Award. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate and 2022 Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County Writer-in-Residence. She leads writing workshops and retreats virtually and in the Greater Cincinnati area and beyond. Visit her website at https://paulettahansel.wordpress.com/.
Poem Beginning and Ending with Lines from Ada Limon
A whole unhatched chick.
That’s how I think of my poems,
the ones I do not write. What is it I am so afraid of,
that keeps my mind scurrying down one burrow,
up the next? Already I am mixing my metaphors.
It’s April. Bunnies and eggs, and as always, I envy
the pink froth of blossoms on the neighbor’s
dogwood down the street, while my weeping
cherry neglects, once again, to bloom. Reedy brown
branches beginning to green. Unfeathered and bone-
still, the poems I write unquickened in their caves.
Is it ok to begin with the obvious? I am full of stones.
Lines are from “Cyrus & the Snakes” and “The Magnificent Frigatebird” in The Hurting Kind.
To My Mother, Five Years Gone
Did I tell you I never forgot the story
you told about the mule you called Old Sam?
How he came back home to die.
How he remembered you
enough to come to you
when love was needed as a home in which to die.
I didn’t know then how to love you enough.
How to brush your hair and feed you from my hands.
What journey did that mule make? Broke free the stranger’s
fence and trudged the winter fields and trails
to stand outside your father’s barnyard gate
and nuzzle your small face.
I didn’t know then how to sit beside your bed,
no words to mark the space between us.
