Each month Undaunted Joy will feature a guest post. It is good to look at joy from a different view than just mine and it is good to hear those who have made Undaunted Joy a community of voices.
This week Undaunted Joy features Mary Kollar. Mary and I are members of the same gym. Three times a week we pack in more conversation in the five minutes it takes her to ready for her swim than most do in a day. We quickly discovered we are both writers with a passion for art and faith. My life is better for those chats.
Savor her poem contrasting faith and loss, winter and spring, discovered while walking home from a class on The Literature of the Holocaust.
City of the Lost Spring
Candy tuft against a picket fence.
I planted it there,
a sprig of a thing, fifty cents of a chance
that April would return
and the sun would warm the fence
you painted in August’s heat.
These flowers are white coins
where I walk through the gate, alone,
my ears tuned to words read
in a memoir of the Holocaust --
all despair thrown up against what
spring would want me to forget.
What I had forgotten was spring itself,
Faith that it would return
after you had gone.
I looked for you in odd places --
the tool shed behind muddy rakes,
a corner of the shed where we stored seeds.
Loss is like that, fooling recollection --
where you last set a spade
before turning to another task,
or the combination to a lock
you thought you knew by heart.
It had always opened the door.
Now this two o’clock sun
on an April day calls out
White on white –
the candy tuft,
the whitewashed fence.
I close winter’s gate behind me.
Mary Kollar lives in Seattle and Quilcene, Washington. She has taught English in public high schools and retired from the University of Washington, where she co-directed the Robinson Center for Young Scholars. She has published in several literary journals, including Calyx, Blueline, The Connecticut River Review, Crab Creek Review, Soundings. She is anthologized in The Breath of Parted Lips (Frost Place) and has a collection under the imprint of Hyacinth Press: Something Borrowed: Poems of a Daughter and Mother. as well as with Allan Kollar A Season of Vision and Voice, a collection of 40 years’ poems and original prints designed for December holidays. Her blog is Thoughts After Seventy.
If you would like to write a guest post, send me your submission. Perhaps we can find a home for it! With over 1100 subscribers, I’d love to use this Substack to share some new joyful voices.
Beautiful!