A City Woman

A poem by Mary Hamrick

             Happiness is when what you think,
                    what you say, and what you do
                           are in harmony.
                                 ~ Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

As she blackens the edges of her eyelids,
she looks wilder than the island she inhabits.

Full-body blush, she is clean of sin;
her curves are swollen in flawless, creamy fragments.

Absorbed in living, she ignores the ticking of her seasoned face
and touches her energy with breathable force.

In search of beauty, she will hunt on forest floors.
Taming the beasts of the fields with her faint pink smile,

she is full of fire and strong like the forward motion of a train.
She does not play her mother’s music

and does not sing her father’s song. This radical moves
in deep blue seas and sings aloud, moving like a symphony.

Listening to Coltrane, inky-dark, city eyes
blink shut.

Previously published in Poems Niederngasse.