Three Poems By Deborah J. Shore
Upheld
Sometimes you are carried by the wreckage
of your own ship—as helpless to direct this
flotsam as you were when it was floorboards
that lurched beneath disquiet cries of shorebirds.
The grief and panic, the sorrow that longs for rest,
swell into the fiercest ocean crest—
it does not break and drown but pushes you, bobbing,
on, churning under, rippling through your body
like grace, distress the thickness of the shoulders,
felt ache the circle of the arms draped over
your thoughts. Where there is no one, there is All
and gratitude for what you couldn’t call
a reason, a solution, or an end
but a message that will eddy while you mend.
Unbending Mite
Neither sand nor rock but gravel—
no sigh of seas, no stalwart alp—
just shifting scree, steeps’ risk in travel,
neither sand nor rock but gravel.
Worn down, worn small—flat field, hardscrabble—
the vastness ebbed, the pulse doubt’s prowl.
Neither sand nor rock but gravel,
no sigh of seas, no stalwart alp.
Coming to Rest
Dizzy, dizzy—tired.
Geeks call it “spolling,”
when the spinning coin
begins to rock
on its wide
perimeter, its center of mass
getting lower, the sound
a wavering as if
the original force was just about
spent. But that’s when
the quaver converts to a rolling rasp,
then the chirr of the scored edge,
faster than before,
while the face throws outward,
upward gleams—
the settling to ease
an unhindered albedo of dream,
a quickening.
albedo—the proportion of light hitting a surface that the surface reflects back, often used of planets
About The Author
Deborah J. Shore has spent the better part of her life housebound or bedridden with sudden onset severe ME/CFS. Her poetry has appeared in The London Magazine, Pensive, Nashville Review, THINK, Prelude, Thimble Lit, ballast, Reformed Journal, Christian Century, and Christianity & Literature, among others. She has won poetry competitions at the Anglican Theological Review and the Alsop Review.