Trust
Sometimes it is good to wait:
the pause that took years to complete
finally ends—your voice
an exclamation of amazement
at where you have landed,
what you have become.
That brief turning away
to answer the call of another,
and forgetting to mark the trail,
the forest of green closing in.
And how bright the day
you recognized, at last,
the one tree that mattered—
the mighty trunk of your own body!
and climbed it to find the path back.
Picking up the pen again
as if you’d never stopped,
the heft and hue of two decades
suffusing the valley of your being,
and all the small scurrying things
finally freed, newly seen
within the round comforting day
of a different vision. Head bowed
over the acreage of your desk then,
grateful for the energy so
quietly at work in that dark—
as if, when you turned away,
one hand shook the other.
-Lynne Burnett
Lynne Burnett is the winner of the NinaAlvarez.net Poem of the Month Contest, October 2017.
Lynne Burnett lives in the Pacific Northwest. Recent publications include Blue Heron Review, IthacaLit, Mockingheart Review, New Millennium Writings, Tamsen, Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art, Best of Kindness 2017 Anthology and a Tupelo Press chapbook anthology. She is the 2016 winner of the Lauren K. Alleyne Difficult Fruit Poetry Prize, and received special merit in Comstock Review’s 2017 Muriel Craft Bailey Prize. Her chapbook, “Irresistible” is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press, spring of 2018.
Many thanks to all those who submitted your beautiful and transcendent work.
You can still submit to the Poem of the Month Contest for future months, and to the Cosmographia Chapbook Contest.
Poem of the Month 