Erosion

A garden once planted in spring,
bearing life in shade and sun,
now tangled with weeds and blight.

A hearty yield once sustained
by dew and noon rains,
now forgets in autumn light.

Basket of Gold, having bloomed
and stretched for sun,
now shrivel, scorched by drought.

Honeysuckle, a trespasser in flora,
once nurtured monarchs
and bees.

Once a bounty of bliss,
now wild bramble
on depleted soil.

Wisdom of soils and seedlings,
now crumbles to dust.
Her secret garden.

-Barbara Leonhard

Act V, Scene IV Of My Mother’s Life

My mother disintegrates;
little by little she sloughs off her skin,

sheds minute pieces of herself
into the sunlit shafts of spiralling air.

I watch as she dredges through the
sludge of memory for something solid,

something to serve as a handhold
to keep her balanced as she

navigates the slippery path
between one moment and the next.

Her eyes, half-closed, are obscured by
cobwebs; she struggles to focus,

the past too far away, things close to hand
inexplicably unfamiliar.

She is a house unoccupied, dust gathering
in the corners of the cooling rooms.

-Beth Brooke (Third of her series of poems. See earlier days for the other two)

Bios and Links

-Barbara Leonhard’s

work is published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Free Verse Revolution, October Hill Magazine, Vita Brevis, Silver Birch Press, Amethyst Review, PhoebeMD: Medicine & Poetry, among others. Barbara won prizes and awards for her poetry in the anthology Well Versed 2021 and Spillwords, where she was voted Author of the Month of October 2021, nominated Author of the Year for 2021, and recognized as a Spillwords Socialite of the Year in 2021. You can follow Barbara on her blog site, https://www.extraordinarysunshineweaver.com.

-Beth Brooke

was born and did important parts of her growing in the Middle East. The landscapes of both these places are strong influences on her writing. She has had work published in a number of online journals and has been placed in a couple of small poetry competitions. She loves writing poems and sharing them with other people.