Kit Zack    

The Pasture
  
A sorrel and a bay mare kick up snow   
cantering within the barb-wired field

a chummy tag, the front runner slows to buck,  
chase me, catch me, giddy as children.

Whirling powder stirs playfulness
back to a time before bits, bridles, fenced pastures

claiming fields and meadows,
they neigh to mares fenced nearby.   

Reveling in the flurries, the mares
nuzzle and whinny,        

then bow to the ground,
synchronized dancers, 

rolling and rolling, scattering snow
snorting and carefree.

I imagine them nodding to me
to mount the fence and join the play.

 

(previously published in Avocet)

 

 

 

 

Iona Pilgrimage

Absence of TV/tablet/worldly-rattle
I follow paths where nuns, four centuries
ago, walked ancient ways, eyes/ears/heart/open
to stillness, to universal
breath of wakefulness, alive
with silent trembling,
with rapture floating on a dove’s wing
carried over azured waters
above the crumbling monastery of stone
to dwellings of praise
swelling soundlessly above the mountain’s steep.

 

 

 

 

At the Community Resource Center

Every six months she arrives at the center.
She has it timed, down to the exact day
when we may (circumstances favorable)
help pay for the light bill.

She can never get ahead. Last month
her fourteen-year-old Ford broke down,
again, and the bus only runs from her trailer park
to the highway twice a day.

I smile into her brown eyes
and somehow she smiles back. I reach
across the desk and press her hand.
How do I tell her that she is beloved,
that her children deserve apples and milk,
that I admire her more than she will ever know?

Today, I can write the check
that appeases the landlord. She waves
as she leaves the door. And I am buoyed
by her humility as she returns to her shift at Burger King.

 

 

After a teaching career Kit and her husband moved to Lewes, DE. In 2015 Kit was published in five anthologies as well as The Lyric, California Quarterly, Portage, Newversenews, Your Daily Poem, and has poems forthcoming in Albatross and Earth’s Daughters.