Welcome to Sunday Morning Lyricality, featuring a weekly song or poem by a Minnesota writer. Our current guest editor is Susan Thurston.
Echoes of the word “waiting” from last week’s poem drift into this week’s offering. My mother would encourage me in times of trouble to “count your blessings.” That sort of listing is where this poem begins and then, as all good poems do, it opens out to include the unexpected and becomes an anthem for hope and the anticipation of receiving the possibilities offered in another day.
Susan Thurston
Everything Waiting
Beverly Voldseth
The dark for light
empty road for cars
trees for warmth and leaves
the empty school for students
the house for lights
the kitchen for warm toast
and coffee smells
day for work
body for clothes
food and talk and touch
the feet for shoes and someplace to walk to
the ears for whatever sound and its own name
oh how the ears wait
or is it the heart
ears connect directly to the heart
so it is the heart that waits
this [heart] or the fist sized
fist shaped muscle in the chest
that waits just off center
waits and beats and waits and beats
while the holding it waits
for the blood to make its rounds
waits out the twinges and pains
wakes in the night to them
wakes and wonders is it my heart
waits for morning and sunrise
and body rise a new day
and work and food and books
finally forgetting to wait because
everything she’s ever wanted seems
there in those daylight hours
in those upstairs rooms
waiting just for her.
***
Beverly Voldseth was editor and publisher of Black Hat Press and Rag Mag, a semi-annual lit mag. She created a forum and community for countless poets from throughout Minnesota and around the world. She lives in Goodhue, Minnesota, where she is organizing and sorting through decades of her sterling work, and is the matriarch of her family of three daughters and their children. “Everything Waiting” is found in Tremors Vibrations Enough to Rearrange the World (Heywood Press) and appears with permission of the author.