Other girls trudged through snow in summer sandals,
their roadside footprints ghostly, lost sisters, aunts, mothers.
Irma wore ski boots. Her father insisted.
The survivors are dying.
Dirt and dust, the echo of earth against pine
linking all the grave site lines.
She stands at the lectern: Optimism is our obligation.
Laurie Hurvitz's poetry has been published or is forthcoming in the Christian Science Monitor, Minimus, and Poet Lore. Her poetry has been selected for display in the Poetry Gallery located in the Montgomery County (Maryland) Executive Office Building and for a Poetry Bench commissioned by The Public Arts Trust of the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County. For more than twenty years, she practiced law in the District of Columbia, and currently she writes grants and publications for a hospice organization. She lives in Bethesda with her husband and two children.
