The Innisfree Poetry Journal

www.innisfreepoetry.org

by Jane Ellen Glasser

What She Longed For

To have each day open

like a love letter;

to slip out of her past

the way an unzipped dress

puddles to the floor;

to empty the mind

and feel it flap

like a windsock;

to let spirit play,

dust motes

on ladders of light;

to set her senses

singing

through all her organs;

to dance

across continents

while standing still;

to float

beneath the moon

in a Chagall painting.

to be awake

in her dreaming.

Winter's Lessons

Trees stripped of summer's store

and fall's giveaway reveal the bones

of what stays. The river frozen

to the shore's lip speaks less,

keeps to itself what belongs to itself.

The bear in his den, the bat suspended

in his cave, know when to sleep

and when to wake. No longer

hitched to the world's rhythms,

no longer ruled by appetite, they wait

for an inner pull to rouse them.

And what is more instructional

than snowfall, its knack for making

the familiar new. Or night, arriving early,

flooding its borders at both ends.