”Now, Then”
-Susan Beard
Reading to you and pausing to explain,
I notice your studying, then stroking,
the veiny bumps on the tops of my hands
and I remember, when I was your age,
first really seeing — with worried disillusionment -
those mortal markers, as I trace them
across my mother’s rivered skin.
Susan Beard is a frequent-as-possible member of the Lansing Skaaldic Society and a retired adjunct writing lab instructor at L.C.C. In an e-mail she said she ”fed” on poetry for more than 40 yrs, both as reader and a writer of this genre, that refreshes, cleanses, and helps in my inner and outer health. Despite naysayers among family and friends that I waste time with this art that earns no money (except some scant dollars from two small bks. I self-published ten or so yrs. ago), I’ll continue to sustain my spirit with poetry as long as I breathe!
