Gita Smith

Gossip

Crows spread their rumors overhead, some of them believed by jays
who take up the cry. I wear a careless Saturday hairdo
and a half-buttoned coat. I walk in step to a soundtrack
of my own composing, in slow 4/4 time.

I'm neither old nor young on this ruddy day
that smells like autumn
and is wrapped in light
and the gossiping of crows.
I roll my grandfather to the park where
the scents of wet leaves
and wood smoke touch off
olfactory synapses,
our links to childhood.
He is now only the shell of my grandfather,
his once-strong facial bones collapsed,
his ropey eyebrows
like circumflexes atop the confused Os of his eyes.
His face spreads wide in a smile of pleasure at the sight of
a black Lab leaping for a Frisbee.
One withered arm rises slowly
and he calls, "Catch it boy, good boy, good Sparky!"
We sit together on a green park bench, dreamers both;
grandfather chases a long-ago dog through the flaming maples of Quebec,
and I chase a not-yet-written story to its conclusion.

This piece was first published in America’s Emerging Poets, 2018.

The First Fifth

The first time that
Beethoven’s Fifth was played,
people ran into the streets.

Men and women wept.
No one was left unchanged.
Thieves returned coins and silver while
Wife beaters laid hammers to their hands.

Clergy turned away from preaching hell
and sang long hymns of love at mass
or all alone in bare-walled cells.

The audience and those outside the hall
wanted nothing more than love,

to love,
be loved,
make love and music,
all.

This piece was first published in Alabama’s Best Emerging Poets, 2019.

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Gita M. Smith is an ordinary, aging woman who writes and keeps a garden.