Marilyn Chambron
Two Poems
This Place Called Home
We stand at the precipice of time.
A time which has seen us stumble and falter but not alter our ideals of a nation for the people and by the people.
Let’s bury the hatchet not in flesh but to the root of the tree of backbiting, bitterness, betrayal and bitchery.
A nation able to bear its soul but not lose its solace for one another.
Uplifted by a people, all people, who have a stake in our fertile soil of liberation.
A sacred soil drenched in the tears and blood of those who realized we could not continue as separate but equal.
Come out of the winter of deceit, debauchery and disparity and enter the spring of renewal, rebirth and repair.
Unity has not been reached but we strive toward the prize set before us as we envision: not division or revision, but a decision to press through the noise, through the hate, through the pain to stand as one people united in this place called home.
Recall
Recall another ordinary day
Within another ordinary week
Recall the plague which will not go away
Destroying both the mighty and the weak
Recall flash points of death and of dying
Visual assaults upon the sane mind
Recall families shocked and now crying
Pray to heaven for a little more time
Recall our collective fear unspoken
Masks, testing, placebos and quarantines
Recall all promises made, then broken
Hopes and dreams of an effective vaccine
Extraordinary year now ending
Lessons, scars and revisions still pending
—Submitted on 01/23/2021
Marilyn Chambron‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Colorado Sun and Social Distanzine. She is a retired financial services manger, and lives in Denver.
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Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993.
