Elizabeth J. Coleman

New Year's Eve

  We almost stayed in town and missed this snow,
  almost missed pine branches’ droop,

  reminding us of snows that said there’d be no school
  when they grew deep on a childhood stucco wall.

  We almost didn’t see hillocks of snow
  perched on the ledge of our cottage window,

  branches weighed down from
  morning’s ivory fall.

  Now tiny white flags have been unfurled,
  silent flares lit to greet the coming year.

  In this time, when snow’s so rare,
I’ve learned a word that isn’t mine to say

  for this mysterious ichor that’s appeared
  in the night, and that I whisper

  to respect the music of the moment’s silence,
  to respect those who knew of what they spoke,

  those who had a specific word
  four thousand years ago

  for softly falling snow.

(An earlier version “New Year’s Eve” (as “Snow on New Year’s Eve in the Anthropocene”) appeared in Blue Line, Issue 40, Volume XL)


In the Morning in the City

I watch the woman across the way comb
her hair, and she watches me comb mine.

I’ll never understand why the bodega
at the corner had to close, for it’s there

we’d buy yellow roses. I am a child of a man
who loved to sail, and a woman

who loved to do needlework.
On the other side of the door is the man

who, for over fifty years, has been my pearl
person, my moss person.
Together many summers
we’ve watched purple irises bloom.

The mountains we love are old and small,
my love, but then we come home

to the city, and see the woman across
the way at her typewriter as we eat.

We wonder what she’s writing, so intent.
The clouds are so close and the air so still

in this city where my mother died
thirty-four years ago on my birthday.

You make me fried eggs, and I
toast you whole wheat bread,

you with your moustache,
me with my freshly combed hair.

(“In the Morning in the City” first appeared in Passionfruit Review, with a commendation)


Windhovers

      Looking up at the sky, I remember Earth
doesn’t stand still, calm and reassuring,
a garden in Abinger Hammer, with afternoon
      tea and hedgerows, and bees foraging.

      Remember the time at Six Flags over Georgia,
      Momo the Monster’s cars spun
      in the opposite direction from the ride itself,
      and I feared my six-year-old, in her blue
      overalls, and I would fly off into space.

Now another comet has invaded our solar
system; Borisov is heading towards its heart.
In a hundred years, the sea will crest
      a yard higher, and a dozen islands disappear.

      A group of swans is called a lamentation.
      The stars—indifferent—masquerade as friends.
      Then again, last summer in Maine,
      you played with the twins in the waves,

      and our son, in his mid-forties now,
      did perfect handstands on the beach.

(“Windhovers” first appeared in Cider Press Review in December, 2024)

About the Author

Elizabeth J. Coleman is the editor of Here: Poems for the Planet (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), and the author of two poetry collections: Proof (Spuyten Duyvil Press 2012), a University of Wisconsin Press prizes finalist, and The Fifth Generation (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2016), as well as three chapbooks. She translated into French the sonnet collection, Pythagoras in Love/Pythagore, Amoureux (Folded Word Press, 2016). Her poems appear in, among others, 32 Poems, Baltimore Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Colorado Review, and Rattle, and in numerous anthologies. She lives in New York City, and for many years also had a home in the Catskill Forest.

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