Your eyes go to glass and your
thoughts are on that craggy mountain shelf where
old Shelby raised heirloom apples and children.
I watched old Shelby glass into the past, telling me
stories of dispatching snakes—rattlers, copperheads and
moccasins, till his kids could tread
the mountain free of them.
The snakes thinned but apples enough
for you and me remain in this Ozark, near enough Eden.
We love every curve, even after the ice storm.
But the old divorced couple won’t sell.
Wren Tuatha’s poetry has appeared in The Baltimore Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Loch Raven Review, Clover a Literary Rag, Five 2 One Magazine, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Digges’ Choice, The Green Revolution, and the anthology Grease and Tears. Wren and her partner, author/activist C.T. Lawrence Butler, herd goats on a mountain in California.
© 2017, Wren Tuatha
Halfway Down the Stairs 