Off into the woods,
180 acres of lost. I carried
no breadcrumbs, no plan
to map my way back. Home
itself, a sly cottage of honeyed
lies set amidst the aching green
of those acres. When I arrived
at the new hut, the witch who leaned
out her sugar-pane window seemed
the lesser of two dark paths.
I married her son and soon found
myself wandering the forest
behind a house again.
There were no signs
of a better way, so I learned
to echo birdsong, and wind
became my ballast. Through field
and woods, the sonata of a stream
at my tilted ear, at last one day I settled
into my stride. Even now when the world
presses in, I seek a path to wander,
knowing they all lead to the same
winding truth of my heart.
No fairies or good witches
will save us. We must walk and walk
until we know how to build our own
wafer-thatched roof and gingerbread
walls, until we can sink our teeth
into a slice of our own
sweet hearth.

C. Ann Kodra

C. Ann Kodra, independent editor in Knoxville, TN, has poems and short stories published or pending in Memoir Journal, Now & Then, MOTIF^v1, MOTIF ^v3, Prime Mincer, Yemassee, RHINO, Still: The Journal, and others. She is a contributing editor for New Millennium Writings and served as a guest poetry editor for The Medulla Review. She won first place in the 2012 Old Gray Cemetery Poetry Contest and served as its 2013 judge. Her poetry chapbook, Thin Ice, was published by Medulla Publishing in 2011. She is currently working on two full collections, one of short stories and one of poems.

Photo: Brooke Shaden “the work of early mornings”
Contact: http://brookeshaden.com/gallery/

28 Jun This entry was published on June 28, 2014 at 12:05 am and is filed under 7 (June 2014), Archive, Poetry. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.