Found

 Poetry arrived in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where it came from,
from winter or a river.
—Pablo Neruda

By Joanne Jagoda

I went back to my old neighborhood,
wrote about the cracked skylight in the too-warm kitchen,
the Norman Rockwell calendar,
hanging next to crinkled appointment cards under thumbtacks,
and recalled my immigrant mother serving lunch to Mr. Cooper,
a crusty handyman in overalls,
her thick deviled egg on challah and a fat slice of marble pound cake.

I wrote about golden poppies trailing over the splintery fence,
the glorious lilac tree in the backyard,
Mrs. Fishel spying from behind her living room drapes,
keeping the street safe,
and Mrs. Hetrova, our piano teacher, who came on Wednesdays,
with her pillbox hat where she hid her money from hooligans.

I wrote of “going downtown” on the 5 Fulton
with my mother and sister,
wearing little white gloves, a dress, never pants,
for school shopping at the Emporium on Market St.,
then tuna on toast at Blum’s and sharing a piece of crunch cake.

And it all came flowing back to me,
the fog shroud, the briny smells, the eucalyptus trees,
Saturday afternoons in Golden Gate Park
rolling down and down Lindley Meadow with my cousins.

And when I journeyed “home,”
it was as if I viewed my life through a new prism,
but I couldn’t stop the sad memories from showing up too,
party crashers, poking and prodding,
stories I did not want to dredge up
but could not leave untended or unwritten.
I had found my voice.

Published in The Write Launch

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash