Short Visiting Hours for Children
Rent from DeepDyve- Short Visiting Hours for Children
These Noddies have nothing else to wait forbut God will make no intercessionso why are visiting hours so short cut by razorswhen pain is a dominant extension:stretched out white winter snakeor the braids Mother used to loop around her fingerour shining copper,chestnut,lustre like new butter.
Children lined on stretchers in hallsreminiscent of the Civil War drummers &soldierboys with gun, aged 14:girls ephermeral in white down aisles like a nunnery, 9. 10. 11O Convent:Covenant:white bedsteads with the whirlpool of vacant white airspinning beside them a top inan abyssVortex open & upover a metal cup.Anything but a "lippy" child the nurse hacked:the void wheels in small circles of steamed milk.There was a childhood left behind:flower coming out of cracks in the sidewalk.Now the red & the white corporals are drawn from the vialgunning, warring.
The flocked lamb simply fell out of my armsLoss struck like a fistlike the Wonderful Wallendas on their final demonstration; [End Page 177] The Hours of the Mothers & Fathers came & went down stairs like choirboys carryingcandles:the mirrors reflected themthe poor hourswhen a whirlpool suctionedautumn rain& teal iceglazier of Chylde winter's tomb came.Why, when all was so brief, shorn, puny & the will of the matron iron-strong,Why were visiting hours not more long? [End Page 178]
Lynn Strongin is the author of two recent books of poetry, Rembrandt’s Smock (Plain View P) and The Girl with Copper-Colored Hair (Conflux P). A five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she is hard at work on her new anthology Crazed by the Sun: Poems of Ecstasy, a companion volume to The Sorrow Psalms: A Book of Twentieth Century Elegy (U of Iowa P). She currently lives in British Columbia, Canada but considers her voice intrinsically an American voice in poetry.
