Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda served the Commonwealth of Virginia as Poet Laureate from June 2006 to June 2008. The Dead Mule published six of her poems in April 2008. We’re so gald she’s home for the holidays.

Near the Park

She does not know me: the woman
in the thin cloak, sitting alone
on a park bench. It is winter.
Snow barely covers the stones
where I stand before a marble fountain.
I cup my hands and whisper:
If this woman were my mother,
she would kneel beside the stones,
her dark eyes my own, her voice
passing gently through the years.
It would be Christmas again,
a light snow falling, Mother
taking me home: I have just
been born. My brother and sister
return from the woods.
Our father has selected a pine,
its branches full, needles still
moist. Beside the fire no one
mentions there are no presents
to open. Father leans over
and kisses me. Mother takes
my hand. Now, near the park,
the woman, too old to manage
otherwise, wraps her hands

around a cane, rises slowly,
then disappears. She has not heard
me whisper or remembered the voice
from long ago. She has not seen
the star overhead, spilling
silence over the years.

From Contrary Visions (Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1988).

**

Christmas in Bolivia

On the streets of Cochabamba, Indian women sell miniatures of Mary, Joseph, the three kings. My husband holds up a four-foot pine, bargains the price down, then smiles, boyhood all over his face, good to be home where he can decorate the tree in the native reds, greens, and blues of this fertile pampa. Hot, the streets of this city, close to the sun. I look up at the fabled god Inti showering the cathedral, its tower of bells and clock marking the hour: noon, the stone condor aloft its perch in the plaza Catorce de Septiembre, mythical bird lifting its wings brought alive by Inti’s fire and the trick of midday glare.

My husband drops bolivianos into the cup of a blind woman seated by the cathedral doors. Her face, furrowed and browned, softens in the protective shadows as if she senses the sparrow skittering toward her. Flapping its wings, it lifts, then touches down on the woman’s cup, tipping it over, causing her to jump and grab the tin vessel as if to avoid a robber. My husband leans down and rights the container. Speaking in soothing tones, he pours the coins from the cup into her hands so she can count them, their size and weight familiar to her fingers.

I lower my head and ask for the sparrow to bless this Indian woman. In the square someone plays the quena as though he has swallowed the wind.

From Gathering Light (College Park, MD: SCOP Publications, Inc., 1993).