Poems by Susan Kelly-DeWitt
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Cherries, 1960
by Susan Kelly-DeWitt
From Canary Summer 2013
Susan lives in the Lower Sacramento Watershed, about two miles from where the Sacramento and American Rivers meet.
We waded knee-deep through quaking grass and brome into the orchard’s shade
to pick the dark sweet Bings that dyed our cheeks and lips and chins in cherry.
A man with an oilcloth tablecloth and a sign “Bing Cherries $1 a Bucket” gawked
after us and grinned, as if to say, cherries—that’s all there is to happiness.
The Buttes were to our west and to our east, the hazy Sierras. We did not know our father
would be buried between them a few years later, or that the orchard would be sold off, bulldozed.
We stuffed our mouths recklessly, full of ripe fruit and easy laughter,
as if there would always be plenty more where these came from.
© Susan Kelly-DeWitt
Lament for the Flowering Pear Tree
by Susan Kelly-DeWitt
From Canary Summer 2019
It resembles
a crucifixion--now that the men
in their helmets, their bucket-trucks
have come
and gone, and the severed limbs
have fallen, and the leaves
have been cleared,
and the few remaining
branches sag
into the humid
dusk.
What is done cannot be
undone, the inner priest
pronounces.
We paid. It was necessary
to save what might be lost
in a sudden breaking
away,
to guard the passers by
who sheltered briefly
in its shade.
Soon the stars will come out to grieve
and spangle
the cold night
sky above the tree's fresh
wounds.
© Susan Kelly-DeWitt
Late February
by Susan Kelly-DeWitt
From Canary Fall 2016
Good
that the flowering pear doesn’t know
(the supple sprawl of its limbs, so swollen just now
with a twitchy flock of finches) that my gardening book defines
Pyrus
as a short lived tree
(although
the date and time of death, down to the last
milli-
second might be coded within
the cells of phloem.)
It flaunts
its fresh snow-bride clouds
of loose blossoming
against the thunder claps
and the gray sky.
© Susan Kelly-DeWitt
River Trail
by Susan Kelly-DeWitt
From Canary Fall 2015
I hate to disturb the dragonflies
in their zinc-flecked flight through
the reeds through the spikelets
of deer grass
their stickpin glit darting before me, zip
and zigzag
one
two
three
four
five
of them, dazzle and dip, among the diatoms—
as I put one blind foot before the other,
as we all must do sometimes.
© Susan Kelly-DeWitt
Salmon
by Susan Kelly-DeWitt
From Canary Spring 2013
They came up the river like a band of slick
thieves. The water was thick with their leaping.
They climbed together the ladder of rapids,
hurled themselves and scraped their bellies.
The dead ones floated like pickerel weed. Many
fell out of the river of time, littering the rocky
banks, drawing the rats, raccoons and badgers.
They filled like windsocks with death.
We came there. We carried our eyes
and our baggage of witnessing. We carried
our awe like a causal fin. The willows crept
down to the river’s edge and hung their heads
like sad old men, trailing all their living
silver green leaves, their dusky olive leaves
the color of salmon skin. The beached ones dried
in the sun; they poked like stiff flags from the weeds
and the light passing over them seemed dis-
embodied, preternatural. Somewhere
in the worlds between this one and the dead
river of salmon ghosts, we heard a howling.
O Coho, O Kokanee, O Chinook.
Previously published as To A Small Moth, Poet’s Corner Press
© Susan Kelly-DeWitt
Windmills at Alta Mont Pass
by Susan Kelly-DeWitt
From Canary Fall 2012
The windmills are eerily still.
They stud the hills
like tall white tombstones;
they gather like ghosts
in a churchyard.
A hundred years ago
John Muir stood at the top
of these hills, waist-deep
in poppies and lupine.
Now hawks float, endangered
hieroglyphs, above diesel
plumes feathering the sky.
© Susan Kelly-DeWitt