Frosted Rose
Watch how the frosted rose smiles bravely at the world, lip-sticked mouth in a powdered, fragile face murmurs softly, still here. I’ve seen her. Women in shops, on streets, in care homes, on TV. My mother. Perhaps someday, me.
A Day at the Zoo
Inspired by Zoological Garden by Auguste Macke, 1912.
The birds always know, parrots pontificate, cockatoos declaim, while the sweet-natured deer graze, only flicking their ears, shivering slightly though the sun let down her golden locks, a flow of gold from white-cloud-towers that day the people chattered on about the weather “isn’t it a beautiful day,” they exclaimed, as if the wobbling moon meant nothing, as if the rising tides were not odd, as if a meteor was not heading their way, as if the crows hadn’t warned them.
Merril D. Smith lives in southern New Jersey near the Delaware River. Her work has been published in poetry journals and anthologies, including Black Bough Poetry, Acropolis, Sidhe Press, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Storms, Fevers of the Mind, Gleam, Humana Obscura, and Nightingale and Sparrow. Her full-length poetry collection, River Ghosts (Nightingale & Sparrow Press) was Black Bough Poetry’s December 2022 Book of the Month.
Merril's two poems are quite different from each other, and both are superb. I enjoyed reading them.