Three Poems by Linda H.Y. Hegland

 

A Love Worthy of the Word

 

Even though the dark is coming

on pussy-toed feet,

I can not leave the silence of the trees;

the muted leaves in the dying wind.

 

And even though I hear you call me

I pretend not to hear.

I am in that moment, lost in time,

the invisibility of tears in rain.

 

Baby, I love your storms, but

I am not the best place to find love -

living my life as if I’m forgone,

I am the spent one, my world is in the scars.

The Heat of Stilled Days

 

These are days the weather

sits in my lungs.

White heat, white sand, white sound;

feeling like I will never take a cool breath again.

 

The lightning aches in my head,

the thunder shakes my bones;

birds forget how to fly

and even a rock sweats.

 

A patina of salt coats my lips

and the gully between my breasts.

Making love is like a river over an ocean,

all of the same liquid.

 

I note a scar’s width of sweat

on a tired man’s neck -

on the porches, all people

speak of is loss.

 

Heat brings those losses

to bear heavily on

warmth-addled minds.

The cat licks me, purring.

Suspension

 

I couldn’t have let you go

even if I had wanted to,

then . . . and now.

I wanted to know

how love can shatter us -

I wanted that though

I didn’t know it.

 

I remember,

your hand of leather

caressed my face;

your breath between my breasts.

Your fingers smelled of the

sweat of the night, the

dew of the morning - and me.

 

Outside the window, in the dawning light,

the mountain ridge wears leafy hair of colour;

the sun creeps on the down of your legs.

All I can write these days is grief and love.

I listen to you breathe. I am now all edges,

and grieve about end times.

Linda H.Y. Hegland is an award-winning poetry, lyric essay, and non-fiction writer who lives and writes in Nova Scotia, Canada. She writes the occasional short story. Her writing most often reflects the influence of place, and sense of place, and one’s complex and many-layered relationship with it. She has published in numerous literary and art journals and has had work nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She has previously published two books of poetry - ‘Bird Slips, Moon Glows’ and ‘White Horses’, a book of lyric essays - ‘Place of the Heart’, and a book of  verses and vignettes - ‘Remember in Pieces’.