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Blue Marble Review

Literary Journal for Young Writers

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Morning Hymn

By Allison Gish

Stowie holds her grandfather’s tobacco pipe.

She blows silvery wispy clouds into the sky

And makes plans to find Alaska,

wanting the gentle love of cubs and bears.

I turn to the armoire and reach for my shawl,

pulling the loose strings of fading lavender.

 

In the kitchen hangs the drying lavender

Which she sometimes lights in her pipe.

We sit by the open door and I pull my shawl

Closer around my shoulders. She looks at the sky,

And she says that the clouds look like bears

And that today feels like Alaska.

 

I ask her if she knows that in Alaska

The sky is always a color like lavender,

is always crying, for the weight is too much to bear.

She looks down and rolls the smooth old pipe

Between her fingers, and says that the sky

In Alaska is fine with its cloudy shawl.

 

I trace the cracks in the veneer with my shawl

Covering the tip of my finger like Alaska

Covers Stowie’s thoughts. She says that the sky

Here is too big for her and a piece of lavender

Falls from its clothespin. She puts down the pipe

And she says she wishes she were a bear.

 

Her father walks into the kitchen, bearing

A basket. Re-hanging the lavender, my shawl

Falls and her father mumbles about a broken pipe.

He tells her not to go to Alaska

And in his basket lies something lavender

That he made small for her— it is the sky.

 

The armoire now holds the tiny sky.

Its finely cracking veneer bears

the weight. I’m going to paint it lavender

I think, the same as the color of my shawl.

Stowie asks if I’ve ever been to Alaska

And then says something about pipe

 

Dreams. We watch the sky put on its starry shawl

As celestial bears dance somewhere above Alaska,

And with lavender paint we patch the broken pipe.

 

Allison Gish is a lover of all things natural hailing from the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Young Ravens Literary Review and Foxcroft Chimera Literature and Arts Magazine.

Filed Under: Poetry Tagged With: Summer 17: 12Poems

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