Two poems by Annabelle Moseley

Planting at Your Grave

• It is warm for November
• and the earth is dry and brittle,
• starved for flowers.
• I have to claw at the grass, pull it back by the hair
• trek back and forth to the water hose,
• muddy the soil like a child about to make pies.
• Your child for only ten years,
• I am playing again;
• I am sitting on your sun-drenched lap.
• I bury my hands in the womb of the dirt,
• picking through the weeds,
• letting myself take root,
• and all the time I feel like scratching my way down to you
• but that thought passes
• as I step back and see what I’ve planted—
• purple mums and Gerber daisies.
• Still, I want your voice, your hand, your guidance
• I want visitation rights. But I’ll come when I’m called, Daddy.
• Only then.
• You should be loving this—
• You had to force me to do yard work,
• and here I am with rake and shovel
• tending what I can for you.
• Look at these purple mums and Gerber daisies
• and see your daughter planted on your grave.
• I am not rooted here;
• Watch me walk into the world and live the hell out of it.
• I am not dead.
• Not most of me.

A Time for Silence

• And every bursting forth rising in me,
• each noise of joy and mourning and release
• that clamors through my thoughts to unwind, free
• itself of sound and drift to emptied peace
• is now restrained, held back, suppressed. Instead,
• this voice is breezeless; all the chimes are still.
• Everything is mute — a winter bed
• slept in by one — sheets cold, white as a pill.
• This conversation has its partners, though.
• Insight, reflection, prayer, and not least, grace
• run warm fingers through the white-iris snow
• that piles from my thoughts at steady pace.
• The bold and sun-drenched streak there in the white
• of that mute flower is the spoken light.

Annabelle Moseley served as the 2009–2010 Walt Whitman Birthplace Writer-in-Residence and was named 2014 Long Island Poet of the Year.

Her books include The Clock of the Long Now and The Fish Has Swallowed Earth. Her most recent is a double volume of poetry entitled: A Ship to Hold the World and The Marionette’s Ascent (Wiseblood Books, 2014).

Moseley is the winner of an Amy Award from Poets & Writers and a First Place Writer’s Digest Poetry Prize. Moseley is a lecturer at St. Joseph’s College and founding editor of String Poet, the online journal of poetry and music.