Cheryl Latuner

for my mother

I had to go down first
                on that wooded trail, sodden,
                with rocks sunk in a freshet,
                mud sucking at my boots,

slipping among the roots,
                gnarled and exposed.

But then the trail
                angled up to Cooke’s Pasture.

I stood long with the burdock and goldenrod,
                with the wickets of thistle
                in weathered straw tones,

shoulder to shoulder
                in their November frieze.

I stared through the vacant
                eyes of the bluebird houses,

out over the choked orchard,
                where cows once grazed
                on windfalls,

and finally felt
                the afternoon sun, catching
                and spiriting
                among the tortured branches

                crusted with grey
                lichen, frozen
                in the moment

                                                of wind tearing through.

Cheryl Anne Latuner has published two long-poem chapbooks, The Ballad of Sackman Street and Soon They Will Fly—A Mediation at Fitzgerald Lake. Her poetry has also appeared in  The Comstock Review, The Naugatuck River Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, and Literary Mama. She lives in Northampton, MA, is an avid hiker, and is at work on a place-based memoir—No Long Island Girl