Five Poems by Melissa A. Chappell

 

Paradise, Lost 

 

Outside the ancestral window, 

a thrush cracks the seeded sun. 

 

The ruining arbored porch now honored, 

songless stones cannot lay quiet. 

 

Sing the land of my dreams 

with voices, full and rising, 

 

like the first spring beckoned  

from oaken earth, 

 

our paltry field struck copper  

in the noonday sun. 

 

Her glories are plowed  

under with each turning blade 

 

of grain, year upon reckoning year, 

and coming is the day when the finch 

 

will no longer find its nest  

in the sorrowing eave. 

 

Such an oracle splits the brimming moon,  

breaking in tides across the dark-eyed grass, 

 

till birdsong perishes in tangled night 

outside my window, sighing. 

 

 

Countries Yet to Come 

 

I came to you, 

full of a psalm offering, 

but you had gone, 

 

winged away 

on some slant 

of afternoon sun. 

 

I tended you, 

with my scorned heart, 

feathered mercies 

 

in the nested cave 

of my paperbox, 

the unrelenting Yes 

 

spoken true  

against the world’s  

default of the lifeless No. 

 

You were born, 

not for nests, 

but for skies, 

 

and I am to live, 

not as one dying, 

but as one yet born, 

 

again and again. 

 

Set this heart of straw ablaze 

and the cinders I will scatter 

in flight across the steel gray lakes 

 

of countries yet to come. 

 

 

The Road Winds Home 

 

The road winds home 

among this ruining place, 

 

her shattered light  

and bankrupt dreams. 

 

The names of her children 

lie unremembered as dust on the sill, 

 

for ivy has afflicted her porches. 

 

The hard-won harvest  

is now absent from her widowed table,  

 

a reckoning for words uttered in haste, 

last rites for the silenced blessing. 

 

She wanders lost among the field,  

its grasses ebbing like the unforgotten sea. 

 

Some springs the thrush comes alighting,  

lingering, just beyond my pane — 

 

this bereft place sighs grace, 

and with delicate hand  

 

I will bathe the Bavarian teacup  

in the pools of her eyes, 

 

ink upon my sunlit page. 

 

 

Places of Shuttered Light 

 

I pass them as I am on my way, 

the places of shuttered light. 

Widowed barns sleeping 

among low drifting clouds, 

no whinnying horse to shelter 

or keep, silence yet fragrant 

in the sparrowed loft, and timbers 

well-spoken from spring to spring. 

A house creeps slowly by, 

her skirts tattered around her. 

Once a bride, now long wearied, 

she is motherless and breaking, 

watching the world  

through shattered eyes 

on its indifferent road. 

 

 

Intermezzo 

 

Now at my mother’s piano, 

I am far from you, 

oh child--- 

how the rivers 

between us converge, 

passing cold— 

 

Young once only, 

your dreams were all the fevered sun, 

and Chopin, springtime’s first lover, 

perishing with every daybreak 

upon the dappled grass. 

 

A nocturne yet calls 

across the field, 

stirring the flowers 

wild and easy 

with its dusking hand. 

 

On this side of the river, 

my fire burns slow, 

the seduction of an intermezzo 

contented, true, complete. 

 

Melissa A. Chappell is a writer living in rural South Carolina, USA. Her poetry is greatly influenced by the natural world. She is an ordained Lutheran pastor and has a BA in Music Theory and a Master of Divinity degree. Chappell has previously been published in BlazeVox, Adelaide Literary Magazine, The Orchards Poetry Journal and The Emerson Review, among many others. She shares her life with her family and two miniature schnauzers.