Judith Krum

IMPISH BLUES

Tiny blue jumbles in the young grass, not yet mowed;
Sprigs and spurts of pint-sized periwinkle
Run amok in tufts of green.
Creeping roots explore the lawn with great abandon.
Mischievous forget-me-nots refuse to be tidy.
They will not be neatly arranged.
They cannot be artfully composed.
They do not respond to the name
'Myosotis Alpestris.'
They are not named Elizabeth or Margaret,
But Betsy and Peggy.
Cousin to cowslips and heliotropes,
These impish blues jump in puddles
And arrive at the party with mud on their shoes.
With bonnets all tangled,
They ignore the brick edges of the garden path,
And, following their own tiny way,
Their mouse-ear blue petals skip toward the sapphire sky.

* * *

THEY LIVE

I pile; I do not file.
And that is why
My room is dense with reams of paper,
Full of long-abandoned lines, hints of poems.
Packed in paragraphs of houses,
Fields of sunflower sonnets,
Children sing and grandmothers bake cookies.
Creatures of skin and bone, breath and pulse, they live
In piled stacks of muse-forsaken stanzas.
To destroy them would be murder.

Judy Krum, native New Yorker transplanted to Vermont via Ohio and Maryland, is a teacher, disability rights advocate, and writer whose work has been published in the Berkshire Review, on-line in the Episcopal Church and the Visual Arts, the Inglis House Poetry Workshop Chapbook Bone and Tissue, and several other places. Diagnosed with MS in the 80's, Judy relishes the freedom of language that takes her places that her legs will not. She writes and lives in Bennington, VT, with her musician husband and their long-haired Chihuahua.