The world made sense, and I believed that
even though we’d never met, Jesus loved us.
It made sense we’d sing about his many colors
in Sunday School which reminded me
of colored Easter eggs—how each one tastes
the same, and we’d have our picture taken
beneath the beveled mirror over the mantel
where I stood with my sister and my
three cousins who arrive late from the ranch
on Shiloh Road before their pony ran terrified,
dragging me over gravel, one ankle caught
in the stirrup as the sun fell behind the barn
at a time I didn’t care about grades or
housework but enjoyed the smell of eucalyptus,
and how the damp scent of concrete spoke
of rain on winter mornings that came before.
In the Beginning
Nancy Cherry is a North Bay Area poet and former editor of the Poetry Newsletter, Fish Dance 1995-2000. Her work has appeared in various magazines including Comstock, Cimarron, Calyx, Mid-American, Nimrod, North American, Poetry Flash, Gyroscope and in Catamaran. Her book, El Verano Burning, was published by Radiolarian Press in 2014. Recently she was recorded in Berkeley, CA on https://voetica.com/poets/1001/5 if you would like to hear her voice.
Thank you for including my poem and all your hard work to bring us into the world.
There are beginnings and then there are changes—one overlapping the other. What seems lost may have simply blended into something new—the way innocence can be altered by time and knowledge. Good or bad, we can only claim our own perspective. I try to keep my eyes open.