Obsession

Maybe it started with the composition book
and straight lines I filled and stayed on,
all the words I first learned to spell,
rhyming its own spell, releasing
a geyser: call, tall, small…
my hand another person,
someone strange and strong,
different from the little girl inside my skin,
then to the calligraphy set
under the Christmas tree,
that pen infusing a new language in me
as I held the nib at a slant
to create a new dimension.
Onto carving in slate
and the letterpress
and drawers of fonts.
What stays on a page
or a stone is like saving a moth,
the flutter inside my palms
until I release it to live in the night.
I touch carved letters, press the scar
to feel the healing.
My mother always works her way
onto the page tying or untying an apron
(am I trying or untrying to be her daughter?).
No, I have not lettered her gravestone
though she lines the basin
of our pond. I dive into the past,
swim in her ashes and bits of bone
and plant words in furrowed rows,
surprised by what grows.

—Sarah Dickenson Snyder

Seed: “Maybe it started with”

Source: “How My Mother (Almost) Died,” by Kelly Grace Thomas

Sarah Dickenson Snyder has written poetry since she knew there was a form with conscious line breaks. She has three poetry collections: The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera (2019). Recently, poems appeared in Rattle, Lily Poetry Review, and RHINO. She has been a 30/30 poet for Tupelo Press, nominated for Best of Net, the Poetry Prize Winner of Art on the Trails 2020, and a 2021 Finalist and Semi-Finalist in the Iron Horse Literary Review’s National Poetry Month contest. She lives in the hills of Vermont.