2 Poems
by Mary C. Rowin
I Will Carry You
Follow the cord from darkness
daughter, up, into the light.
You will find me weaving
dried grasses into baskets
large enough to hold your sorrows
strong enough for me to carry
to the river, tip into rushing
water, where burdens are cleansed
against stones, dispersed by rain
and driven far out into the sea.
Destination, Seaside (Aubade to a Mountain)
You, implacable, sit unmoved like the Buddha
you are, sunk deep into your mountain-ness.
Sun’s first rays refract crystals on your shaggy head.
Like clanks of cow bells rouse the milkmaid,
brightening morning warns, Time to go. So I too rise,
reach toward your face, stony like a father’s,
sons gone to war. But you will not miss me.
I am flesh. You are millennia. Now becoming
memory, you are dark as a Yin shadow.
Day is warming to a slow burn.
Mary C. Rowin’s poems have appeared recently in Solitary Plover, Portage Magazine, Panoply, Bramble, the literary magazine of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, and in you are here, The Journal of Creative Geography. Mary lives with her husband and seventeen year-old cat Rio in Middleton, Wisconsin. She is a docent at the Chazen Museum of Art and tutors English as a Second Language.
