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Tenacity


05.04.19 Posted in today's words by

In 2018, Rosalind Kaliden published her first full-length book, Trysting with the Divine, a collection of ekphrastic poems. Her poetry has appeared in Obsidian, Caterpillar, Gemini Magazine, Jelly Bucket, Ignatian Literary Magazine, The MacGuffin, Qwerty Magazine, Valparaiso Review, Moon City Review, The Hollins Critic, Quiet Lunch and The Round. In 2016, she published her first chapbook, Arriving Sideways

Tenacity
By Rosalind Kaliden

I open my blind in the morning.
The sumac branch’s tangerine spray,
red-tipped by the frost,
grabs my attention.
How long did it take the color to pop?
Overnight—slowly?
Then pop again, and the leaf
drops onto the walk
and I sweep it into the burn pile.

The isolated, neon-pink fan
of palmate leaves
catches the dawn’s electric rays
sweeping across the lawn.
The tips wave
and the birds crimp the branches
in the tree’s new nakedness.

A red-breasted grosbeak
enters the soggy-black pilings
of the thin-trunked forest,
followed by a female cardinal,
the blue jay.

The cardinal’s mate maps her path.
A red-dotted-symmetry . . . typed over the edge
of my thick morning paper.



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