November 11-12: Quick Post, Poet Friend, "A Duck's Quack Doesn't Echo"

Just a short post to let you know I'm still alive.  

Had a long and productive day.  Work-work.  Schoolwork.  More work-work.  Parent/teacher conferences for my son.  Cleaning and sanitizing a church.

Then I met with a poet friend on Zoom for an hour-and-a-half.  We wrote and laughed and lifted each other up.

Saint Marty has a new poem to share tonight . . .

A Duck's Quack Doesn't Echo

by:  Martin Achatz

A duck's quack doesn't echo, scalpels through everything.  Cloud.  Pine.  Mountain.  Redwood.  Ocean.  A duck quacked over the Grand Canyon.  Six days later, a woman named Chunua heard that quack in the midnight sky of Wuhan.  

Named by her mother, because, on the day she was born, years before the coughing started, cherry blossoms filled the lungs of the trees with sweetness and beauty.  You are Chunua, her mother said, my spring flower.  And she flourished in the hothouse of her mother's arms.  

When Chunua heard that quack last night, she thought it was her mother's ghost in the bare cherry trees.  Still fevered.  Breath hard as an apricot pit.  Chunua stopped. Listened.  Not wanting to let go again.  Pressed a ghost hand to her face, felt her mother's love dancing like bees against the petals of her lips.