2548 by Cassidy Swanson

Welcome to Sunday Morning Lyricality, featuring a weekly song or poem by a Minnesota writer.

This deceptively simple poem addresses the contradictory feeling of despair mingled with hope. Although the poet is speaking of love, loss, and recovery from grief, this feeling is not unlike what many Minnesotans experience in the dead of winter, waiting for spring. Transformation–in the seasons and in ourselves–is something we want to believe is possible, while we simultaneously feel change is either impossible or impossibly far away. Is that irony or hope, in the poem’s last line, in that tiny word “only?” Maybe–there is both cynicism and innocence.

Tracy Rittmueller

2548
Cassidy Swanson

They speak of seven years
Seven years for new skin—
new cells
Maybe
Maybe my body will forget 
your touch, 
my heart your saccharine love
Seven days have drifted by
— Only two thousand five hundred forty-eight to go

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Cassidy Swanson is a copywriter (BadCat Digital), editor, and freelance writer with experience in the fields of publishing, journalism, and digital marketing. As an aspiring novelist and occasional poet, you can almost always find her with her head buried deep in the pages of a thriller novel or scribbling notes on random scraps of paper. She relishes the rise of Instagram poetry, which has altered the perception of modern poetry and made it more inclusive and accessible. Writing because it is the ultimate form of therapy, she finds the connection fostered between reader and writer to be one of the most genuine and pure.

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