My Edmonds News is pleased to present the latest installment of Poet’s Corner, presented by the Edmonds-based EPIC Poetry Group.

MENDING

How you spit and slick the thread
And twist the knot into the end,
Dip and catch the loop you made
Like a swallow diving through a hoop

Then bind the edges up into a row
Like a fence between the sweater fields
Purling up against the knitted edge
With stitches even as a tractor tread.

The furrow takes a detour down
A shallow and mysterious cave,
The pocket with its incidental loss,
The major reason for the needlework.

An earring or a button or a coin
Or an important key that slithered out
No longer vanish onto passing paths.
Your blanket stitch hems up the odd escape.

Now when I bunch my hands up into them
For warmth or for the comfort of their lair,
I feel your hands, sure in their handiwork,
As if my hand held yours inside those dens.

Kristina Stapleton

~ ~ ~ ~

MY SUMMER VACATION

We dreamed of bikes and swimming at the beach
While making heaping piles of withered weeds
To rescue bean plants from the strangled field,
Weeds popping up from clusters of pink seeds.

By making heaping piles of withered weeds
Each day restores the blankness of the rows.
Weeds popping up from clusters of pink seeds
Return, like manna in the night they grow.

Each day restores the blankness of the rows
And then again, the weeds invade in waves,
Return like manna in the night. They grow
More like a crop than lettuce, squash or kale.

And then again, the weeds invade in waves
Plus raspberries, with ever-bearing stems-
More like a crop than lettuce, squash or kale.
We ate our fill until we hated them.

Plush raspberries with ever-bearing stems-
We plucked them, plucked them, plucked away the days.
We ate our fill until we hated them.
The garden was our prison, was our cage.

We plucked them, plucked them, plucked away the days
To rescue bean plants from the strangled field
The garden was our prison, was our cage.
We dreamed of bikes and swimming at the beach.

Kristina Stapleton

~ ~ ~ ~

SACAGAWEA THE NAVIGATOR

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living.

~Sacagawea

Yes, she was kidnapped, but at the same

Time no, she wasn’t the thin but buxom slave
Brought along as a silent scullery maid.

She was plump and humorous.
Her infant baby was a bonus.

She sang. She knew a lot they didn’t know.
Her jokes kept up their lows.

They understood the angle of her taunts
Even when they didn’t know her tongue.

They suffered her disgust at their mistakes
While she put tough things right.  They ate

What she gleaned off the land when
Provisions not lost at the riverbend

Were exhausted but for tallow candles.
She taught them by example

To enjoy the worst of weather,
To let it knit them all together,

that only fools complain.

Kristina Stapleton

~ ~ ~ ~

Kristina Stapleton is hunkered down in Edmonds for the duration of the pandemic along with her guitar playing husband Billy. Thanks to zoom, she still gets to attend the EPIC Writers Group.