Emily McGady is a friend of mine, though we have never me, spoken to each other, and are from different places and times. We are separated by at least a few hundred miles in distance, and Emily has just begun her college career (while mine ended over 17 years ago – 10 years of higher education total since loved it so much). I met Emily on-line on her blog here, and I always looked forward to her posts and their poetic titles and content.

Emily and I met a little over a year ago, and as I have come to know her better, I have to admit that I have become more than a little envious of her. I envy her youth, I envy the adventures she is just beginning to have in this big, old world, and most of all, I envy her way with words. She has a poet’s heart and it shows in her work. Below are four poems from Emily. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

Pride

I met a lion once.
He padded perfectly on the gravel road
hunter, sovereign. His golden face
the picture of serenity
and contained instinct.

I held out my hand to him
palm up,
in supplication.
And he bent, smelling
my human fallibility and fragility,
he, the singer of the savannah.

His tongue grazed my palms,
tasting, testing. It felt like
velvet and the ocean bottom,
soft and swirling. Almost insubstantial.

And he turned, the encounter
over.
His bearing was quiet.
I was a part of his pride,
accepted. His lioness,
huntress, provider. He is arrogant
and beautiful,
that lion that I met on a gravel road.
-Emily McGady
——————————-

Persephone called.
She says that Hades has locked himself in his room in a dead sulk.
Do you know why?
Because he doesn’t have a planet anymore.
He’s been downsized, and that makes him look bad in front of his brothers Zeus and Poseidon.
And when the lord of the Underworld sulks, do you know what that means?

Zombies.

So please, give him back his planet.
- Emily McGady
——————————–

Missing
I’ve drunk up the ocean, you see.
It’s dry, and the fish are flopping, trying to fly;
the coral’s gasping and the sunken wrecks
stand like petrified redwoods,
gaping and old.
They make me sad,
but I’m too full of salt to cry.
See? I’ve got a white crystalline crust,
creeping over my fingertips
my vagrant lips, my throat.
It’s reached my eyes, and closed over my head.
I’m a geode of salt, and I can’t move.
Stuck in a limbo of cubes,
and all I have inside is hollowness and swishing water.
I’m holding all the worlds water inside me,
and the sky doesn’t seem blue anymore,
it’s cracking, dehydrated.
The ocean bed is brown and scary,
rivuleted mud and fish bones and broken castles.
But I can’t give the water back,
without dissolving (myself, my shell).
What’s me without the salt?
What’s the world without the water?
splash

~*~
- Emily McGady
———————————–

and she dreamed in ambiguities

And so.
She kissed her daughter to help her to sleep.
Because that was the only thing that worked these days.

And she kissed her son on the cheek,
Even though he turned his face away,
and afterwards he scrubbed the spot with his fingers.

And she went around the house
turning off the lights as she trudged to her bed.

And she lay awake thinking about the one kiss that went unkissed.
The one laying in the tips of her fingers, waiting, itching, to be kissed.
The one meant for the sleeper in the apartment across town.

The sleeper who had left in a flurry of shouts and curses and flying clothes
and the smell of angry air swirling through the empty spaces of the house,
and the feeling of frightened child eyes peeping out from a closet.

And she sighed and turned over,
ignoring the demand of that kiss in her fingers.
And she drifted off, the way she does all these nights now,
and sighing, she dreamed of ambiguities.
- Emily McGady

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