Sestina with Violets
Mother’s Day she wanders woods
for a cluster of wild violets, dryad myth
still distant from her knowing, let alone
maenads, girls gone on Dionysian dance.
Our nymph’s a year from bleeding
monthly, longer ‘til she’ll feel that ecstatic
burst between her thighs, her own ecstasy.
Tired from chores and church, she wants woods
crazed with forget-me-nots, wants Christ’s bleeding
far from here, feels her body, her girl myth
merge with this forest. Sprung saplings dance
across her bare legs. A salamander darts, alone.
She lingers by fields of dark moss, alone,
finds clumped, purple-petaled violets, ecstatic
as she spies pale blues and creams, dances
across an icy stream, animistic babe in her woods.
Her mind returns to sun-streamed, stained-glass myths,
wonders, still, if the Trinity manifests here. Bleeding
hearts beneath an oak evoke, for her, His heart bleeding.
She plucks tender violets’ slender stems, leaves some alone,
knows wild rhizomes will reseed, sprout, bloom again. Myth
in spring she knows means poles, sashes, bouquets of ecstasy.
Just now she hears her father’s Frost litany, “The woods
are lovely, dark and deep.” Dad also loves to dance,
teaches her to jitterbug, though she yearns to dance
naked here, imagines a boy as well, bleeding
for her but not dying, lying together in these woods
where she’s come for years to see and feel life, alone
here with box turtles, snakes, chipmunks ’ecstatic,
tumbling, crying out croaks, chits, chips, a mating myth.
Once home, she’ll water then ribbon wildflowers, re-myth
Hallmark’s day for mothers with May Day frenzy, dance
with Dad to Tony Bennett, listen to Miles Davis, ecstatic
with midnight, with blue. Here, stumbling, her knee bleeding,
she slows, sits a final time on the pleasure of moss, of alone.
Soon— after school, choir, homework— again, her woods.
Girl ecstasy apart from society—this myth.
Woods her space where mind and body can dance.
Soon bleeding will become her life, alone.
VA Smith is the author of the poetry collections Biking Through the Stone Age (Kelsay, 2022) and American Daughters (Kelsay, 2023). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in dozens of literary journals and anthologies, among them: The Southern Review, Calyx, West Trade Review, and Ginosko Literary Journal. A former teaching professor at Penn State University and the founder of Chancellor Writing Services, VA is currently at work on a third collection of poems titled On Environmental Adaptability (when she is not biking, hiking, loving on her partner, friends and family, or serving as a home chef).
Grand Little Things 