Two Poems
Susanna Rich
Crater Lake
calls us to reflect its single eyes
breathe its shifting mists
linger at its lapping lips
casts back fishing lines
to teach us how to struggle
with what we don’t know
catch and set it free raises
children from its wide breast
to magic forth frogs and sunnies
from Clutches of Wonder bread
festoons itself with swallows
and dragonflies to joy us in
to sound its depths
conjures swallows and eagles
to give us the sky so
cool a kiss, end of thirst, edge of air
how it basks in sleep we drape
onto its banks
come let its moon mask shiver
off the clothes of our days
speckle us with stars
make of us its ripples
and each other’s shore
AFter My father’s unforgiving winter
Digging to find the spring, I build,
boulder by boulder, a pond
swirling with fish big enough to name—
Genghis Koi, Attila the Koi, King Koi—
shores to moor in,
shallow enough to see bottom,
swaying with lily pad stems,
deep enough for the brood
to flash orange semaphores,
kiss, kissing the surface
where my face appears.
Jay, finch, blue, cardinal—
splotches at dawn flock
to feeders I hang high and baffle
against marauding squirrels—
mourning doves wake me
with their keening,
the whirl of their wings.
Plank by plank I raise beds
safe from poison, tunneling weeds,
teeming with daisies that convince
I am loved, pansies and tulips
that divide and return,
orreries of cosmos and allium globes,
terraces where I can reroot, at last,
his Carpathian grapevines.
Susanna Rich is a bilingual Hungarian-American poet and translator, a Fulbright Fellow in Creative Writing (Hungary), a Collegium Budapest Fellow, and a Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Kean University (NJ). With two Emmy Award nominations for poetry, Susanna is a founding producer and principal performer at Wild Nights Productions, LLC. Her repertoire includes the musical Shakespeare’s *itches: The Women v. Will and Ashes, Ashes: A Poet Responds to the Shoah. Susanna is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Beware the House and SHOUT! Poetry for Suffrage. www.wildnightsproductions.com