Pill Box
You are my magician on call,
a feel-good box
filled with yellow rounds, white pearls,
orange tabs.
Choose,
but take with food.
Your oval shape enameled
with the Eiffel tower on the lid,
stylish when I take you out
of your handbag prison.
You say, what will it be today?
You are storage for remedies:
heartburn, aches cruising my body,
the pounding in my head.
You give hope to my hand
as it snaps the lid open.
Victory
Some mornings the oleander is shadowed
with black moths outside your window,
some mornings rain falls
like a blessing of holy water
sprinkled on the day.
We talk over coffee
in scraps of memory,
gritted
with stories of your teenage years
that once slithered in lies.
Yet we know
your past now floats on a pond
in sea roses we can pick for a vase.
You furnished your house
with hope that warms me like a furry wrap
on a chilly night.
Your victories
over hurdles jumped
are told in dried bones, photos, and souvenirs,
hung on the walls.
Woman with Book
Picasso
You never wanted a woman
blending into a gray world,
painted her in primary colors
but fragmented
like a man keeps his mind.
She sits in a red and gold lounge chair
dressed in a puffed-sleeves
Mediterranean-blue smock,
breasts half-covered in black lace.
A green book lies open in her lap.
Her right arm scaffolds her head
heavy after reading your words:
Art washes away from the soul
the dust of everyday life.
Your profile, memorialized
in a yellow frame, hangs
on the wall behind her.
You know her arms open a bouquet
of love, her lap a book of knowledge,
breasts beckoning for touch.
Yet, you painted her face
looking far into her soul.
Helga Kidder lives in the Tennessee hills with her husband. Her poems have recently been published in Poetry South, Bindweed, Kakalak and others. She has five collections of poetry, Wild Plums, Luckier than the Stars, Blackberry Winter, Loving the Dead which won the Blue Light Press Book Award 2020, and Learning Curve - poems about immigration and assimilation. Next to poetry, gardening and tennis fill her days.
Pill Box
You are my magician on call,
a feel-good box
filled with yellow rounds, white pearls,
orange tabs.
Choose,
but take with food.
Your oval shape enameled
with the Eiffel tower on the lid,
stylish when I take you out
of your handbag prison.
You say, what will it be today?
You are storage for remedies:
heartburn, aches cruising my body,
the pounding in my head.
You give hope to my hand
as it snaps the lid open.
Victory
Some mornings the oleander is shadowed
with black moths outside your window,
some mornings rain falls
like a blessing of holy water
sprinkled on the day.
We talk over coffee
in scraps of memory,
gritted
with stories of your teenage years
that once slithered in lies.
Yet we know
your past now floats on a pond
in sea roses we can pick for a vase.
You furnished your house
with hope that warms me like a furry wrap
on a chilly night.
Your victories
over hurdles jumped
are told in dried bones, photos, and souvenirs,
hung on the walls.
Woman with Book
Picasso
You never wanted a woman
blending into a gray world,
painted her in primary colors
but fragmented
like a man keeps his mind.
She sits in a red and gold lounge chair
dressed in a puffed-sleeves
Mediterranean-blue smock,
breasts half-covered in black lace.
A green book lies open in her lap.
Her right arm scaffolds her head
heavy after reading your words:
Art washes away from the soul
the dust of everyday life.
Your profile, memorialized
in a yellow frame, hangs
on the wall behind her.
You know her arms open a bouquet
of love, her lap a book of knowledge,
breasts beckoning for touch.
Yet, you painted her face
looking far into her soul.
Helga Kidder lives in the Tennessee hills with her husband. Her poems have recently been published in Poetry South, Bindweed, Kakalak and others. She has five collections of poetry, Wild Plums, Luckier than the Stars, Blackberry Winter, Loving the Dead which won the Blue Light Press Book Award 2020, and Learning Curve - poems about immigration and assimilation. Next to poetry, gardening and tennis fill her days.