Patty Lamiell

Patricia Lamiell is a retired higher-education administrator and former journalist. These are her first published poems.

Nora Holds Her Daughter (Poem)

Breathing second-shift exhaust

from the Akron rubber works,

she rocks her baby on a porch swing,

two lives suspended by two chains bolted to a wood-plank ceiling.

Gently at first, then with growing abandon,

legs kick backward from the knee, thrust skyward, then repeat.

Straightlaced black boots strain

to kick through blue wood firmament.

Is it physics or fate or God that makes

one bolt loosen,

snap away from its mooring,

and send Nora and her child lopsidedly crashing?

Mother lands first, head cracking on the back of the swing.

Her baby falls, unhurt, on top of her and crawls away.

A neighbor finds them later,

Nora lifeless on the wide-planked floor,

her daughter on the porch steps,

staring silently into the smoky sky.

Daughter (Poem)

            –with apologies to Stevie Smith

Your hands 

Wrap rope, tie knots, hoist sail

Whoosh–bloom–snap

At attention to today’s wind.

When I was sixteen, I tried to learn to sail.

I read a book, got the lingo

But never the feel

Of wind talking to canvas.

Was it a blustering tyrant, ordering my left hand to loosen the main sheet,

Let the sail puff out its dazzling white chest,

Stick it way way off portside so I lean way way off starboard

To stay afloat?

Or was it a siren whispering,

Feel the breeze on the canvas.

Tug gently on the main sheet, trim the sail, adjust

To conditions as they are?

I could never tell.

But look at you! Rigged and ready, you push

Away from the dock where I am standing, and

Reading wind and sail, right hand steady on the tiller,

Steer into open sea.

And I think:

If you’re swamped by wave or wake,

I will not see you

Thrust your strong hands above water, and,

Not waving but drowning, call “Mother” to me.

No matter.

You wave goodbye as your little boat

Tacks smartly between yachts

And disappears.