Portside

A War Widow

By Mira Hirschl

to Foshka

Framed by a leaning doorway

a black obscuring dress engulfs

a small figure still upright and slender.

A delicate face in a wreath of pewter

wrinkled by the merciless sun

and more merciless grief:

capsule of living gone by

like her irretrievable husband.

Cornflower eyes peer uncomplaining

slightly astonished at the way of life.

I know this woman.

She is an aroma of home. A smell of baked bread

and ripe peaches, a terracotta floor mopped clean

intimate articles airing on the homespun cord

summer heat streaming through ill-fitting shutters

memory of forgotten apple wafting from the cellar.

She speaks through the whispers of half-empty rooms

squeaking chairs, dripping faucets

and barely audible cats’ paws

shuffling to the scraps she leaves them

God’s poor creatures.

She is the fading of a day into a night

mourning dress laid out for the grief-muted

sunrises that lie ahead.   

She is all that.

A wife that kept a vigil with her lifeless husband

brought to her one balmy night when moon turned dull

and stars stopped shining shamed by their splendor.

A mother who beheld her children flee

the impoverished nest

as the fog grew over lingering footprints.

She is that, too.

Once she was comely.

Grace trailed her like a bridal train.

Laughter crowned her home as the foam

crowns the waves of effervescent ocean.

Her loveliness was everywhere.

Mirna Hirschl grew up in Croatia (former Yugoslavia) having experienced first-hand World War II and the communism that followed. She studied architecture and developed her life-long love of the arts. She immigrated to the US in 1962 and lived most of her life in the New York area where she worked as a computer scientist. Now living in Belmont, California, she has been writing and reading her poetry for about ten years. How Memories Insist is her debut collection.