Antoinette Libro

PERFORMANCE
         --for Carol Ann Robertson

The peach tree in the back yard is three years old--
today peaches the size of marbles dot the branches.

Perhaps this year some of the babies will
mature, blushing with bee-bitten skin.

ripe with the juice of performance.

But no. Last night gale winds laid the slender tree low
to the ground, roots reaching into air instead of soil.

We spend the morning after righting the tree,
tamping the soil around its roots;

Stronger now than before, perhaps,
its slim spine loosely tethered to a stake.

Walking back, we pick up a broken branch
and whip the air, then use it as a cane.

Remember the soft sound of her voice,
the matter-of-fact sighs of acceptance

in face of another operation, another rehab.
How she righted herself time after time,

stronger, somehow, more capable than most,
sharing the gifts of expression

on the coffee house platform she created,
where a steady stream

of performers found
their bittersweet voices.

Antoinette (Toni) Libro is the author of three chapbooks of poetry, Kokero: Seasons of the Heart, Women Without Wings (with Carol Ann Robertson), and most recently The House at the Shore and Other Poems (Lincoln Springs Press). Her poems appear regularly in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, most recently Mad Poets Review, Philadelphia Poets, and Paterson Literary Review. She also writes haiku, tanka, and haibun which have appeared in Modern Haiku, Frogpond, and anthologies. She is working on a manuscript of new and selected poems for a book-length collection called Time and Material.