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.
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