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Best Poems Written by Cathryn Coonemccrary

Below are the all-time best Cathryn Coonemccrary poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Cathryn Coonemccrary Poem

Group On Way To Gas Chambers

--Auschwitz, Picture Taken 26,000 Feet in the Air, August 25, 1944

Years away from me, smoke opening for a man to name them. I imagine a child down there in
the box being drawn around him, who hasn’t died yet; who just wants to fly, fly! His last weather,
clear. Not seeing the plane that won’t see him. His mother grips his hand. People down there
among the cold circuitry of buildings, people with no pictures in their future, scared, legs hurting,
tired, hungry. What are they telling their children, look down, look down, don’t look up. Someone
searching the crowd for someone going to the smoke away from them. It is happening again, as
in the days of Nebuchadnezzar. The man pointing an arrow as if at a strain of bacteria, black
words attached to the arrow. I look down into the dirt of the picture, years after the man has put
the picture back into its folder. Someone down there who sees the smoke I can’t from my clean
sky, a woman with my face, maybe, whose picture her beloved took as she smiled under an
early tree in the days of gardens. Now all her pictures are gone. She is with everybody else
down there, she is the Group on the Way to the Gas Chambers, and in those five black words,
who down there knows they are history; what faceless face isn’t sure, tasting the ghost of honey
and apples; who looks at the sky closing over with smoke and thinks there are shoes to fix,
prayers to say in the archangel wings of their language; somewhere in a land

Beyond desolation.

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The Mirror Which Forgot Her

My mother was beautiful when I was young.
In pictures she wore pearls.
I remember her putting on sky-blue eye shadow,
Even her eyebrows beautiful,
like the Arc de Triumphe.
And her ruby brooches,
And her stain glass blouses, rhinestones glinting on her silver shoes,
Hat plush with black feathers.

I loved dressing up in the Eve
Of her gowns,

so that I, too, could be beautiful.

II.

One day my mother cleared away all her Cinderella clothes,
the gauzes of her spring,
.
Her rubies were not rubies, she vanished from pictures.
The mirror forgot her, saying I was the beautiful one,
my face rising into hers, hers falling from mine.

III.

My mother carries her face through the world
Unphotographed, hook of spine crushing the softness inside her;
mother-and-fatherless, uncertain in her bones,
afraid of sidewalks, left turns, yellow lights;
body packed for the small
space of the future.
For a long time now, I have been the beautiful one,
My mother’s face in mine like a relic.
I hold the stick of her arm.
In her face the last energy of sunset, skin unanchored to the bone
that must have made her beautiful once, the girl from another century who looks/stares back
at me from pictures and who does not know me.
The one who wears apricots and powder yellows, standing on the overexposed grass
Of another century, next to the azaleas that have forgotten their pink.
It always seems to be Easter,
the radiant sky blanched white.
My mother who isn’t my mother yet, smiling at whoever is taking the picture,
Not knowing my face will rise from hers, hers fall from mine,
as she looks from the brightness into the future's
long darkness, when the world will never again flock,
like a dove,
to the soft nest of her face.

Details | Cathryn Coonemccrary Poem

Afternoon of Goodbye To His Time

Afternoon of Goodbye to His Time

A picture of my father,
When he was my age now. 
He sits in his office, 
and I am somewhere far away.
He writes in his cramped handwriting,
scours the books where he thinks the truth is.
For his small lunch, he walks out of the picture, 
his body struggles home.   
The screen door collapsing behind him, 
inside the house it is hot, 
A fan stirring the cloud-heavy air. 
In the kitchen, my father eats death 
mixed like arsenic into bread,
tows himself into the den and lies down among the claws 
of ferns my mother has forgotten to water,
the springs of the orange couch pressing into the flesh
He can’t free himself of.
Interference on the TV, a listlessness of baseball.
It is summer,
nights of heat lightning.   
A lover discovers the secret babylons of flesh
behind my wet swim suit.
My father has built a chain link fence
around the Tree of Knowledge.
I am climbing it. 
In the picture, he has more hair,	
less of a belly; 
his face boyish, open.
I run past him, out the door to my lover, I’ll be home sometime, 
I don’t know when.
The small dirt beginning to fall around him.
From far away I see him now in the picture.
He doesn't speak. Just stares into the camera,
reciting Proverbs to answer the despair in his head,
books heaped around him.

If I were to call into the time of that picture,
there would be no answer, the phone ringing 
and ringing. 

Outside the locked door:
halls my father walked down long ago,
steps echoing
on an afternoon of goodbye
to his time.