Forgiveness

Heal Camden (M.A. Reilly, Camden NJ, 2012)

FORGIVENESS

Molly Peacock
From:   Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems. W.W. Norton / Penguin Canada, 2002.

Forgiveness is not an abstraction for
it needs a body to feel its relief.
Knees, shoulders, spine are required to adore
the lightness of a burden removed. Grief,
like a journey over water completed,
slides its keel in the packed sand reef.
Forgiveness is contact with the belief
that your only life must now be lived. Knees
once sank into the leather of the pew with all
the weight of created hell, of whom you did not ease,
or what you did not seize. Now the shortfall
that crippled your posture finds sudden peace
in the muscular, physical brightness
of a day alive: the felt lightness
of existence self-created, forgiveness. 

Those Paperweights with Snow Inside

Patriotic (M.A. Reilly, 2013)

Years ago, Molly Peacock was my teacher. First at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan and later privately.  I always found this poem to be especially moving.

Those Paperweights with Snow Inside

—Molly Peacock

Dad pushed my mother down the cellar stairs.
Gram had me name each plant in her garden.
My father got drunk.  Ma went to country fairs.
The pet chameleon we had was warden
of the living room curtains where us kids
stood waiting for their headlights to turn in.
My mother took me to the library where ids
entered the Land of Faery or slipped in
the houses of the rich.  A teacher told me
to brush my teeth.  My sister ran away.
My father broke the kitchen table in half.
My mother went to work.  Not to carry
all this in the body’s frame is not to see
how the heart and arms were formed on its behalf.
I can’t put the burden down.  It’s what formed
the house I became as the glass ball stormed.