Spring Miracles

Welcome to Burning Bright, a weekly podcast presenting poetry and prose from Passager. 

It’s Spring, that time of year when we think about birth, new beginnings, miracles. That’s what the pieces on this episode of Burning Bright are about.

Beth Paulson said, “I wrote “Chance” after caring for my younger sister during her recovery from heart surgery. Love and loss are two themes that sometimes come forth in my writing. I believe that even in our imperfect relationships, love can intrude and endure if we allow it.”

Chance 

That my sister was born 
with a murmuring heart 
but I was not. That 
it whispered deep inside her 
sshh, sshh, sshh with every beat 
until one night a valve stopped, 
small dam that finally failed. 

That a surgeon cracked her breast open 
like an egg, her heart the vital yolk 
he probed and patched for hours, 
its finger-sized hole. That later 
we both cried when she showed me 
the line of ragged, bluish stitches. 

That love comes to any of us 
even when we are unmindful. 
That the miracle is we breathe in, 
breathe out, our arms, bodies 
opening, closing around each other, 
answering yes and yes. 

Beth Paulson’s poem “Chance” from Passager Issue 55.

Liz Abrams-Morley said her grandchildren reminded her to slow down. They also reminded her of Albert Einstein’s observation that we can live as if nothing is a miracle or as if everything is a miracle. Here’s her poem “Miracle.”

for Wesley

You make of your mouth a mirror of mine as if, 
at 3 months, your own creation story sits on the tip 
of the tongue in that toothless cave we call your mouth. 

You fill your eyes with bare branches of magnolia, 
your ear with the drip of snow melt. Maybe you think you hear 
milk flow, sun finally chasing winter from our city stoop. 

Take time to look, Georgia O’Keeffe is said to have said. 
I once had a teacher who told me, Don’t ever write about your 
grandmother. Everyone has a grandmother. 

Nights when I was not much older than you are now, 
I watched mine brush the snow river of her hair, 
100 strokes root to ends each night, as her glacial blue eyes 

stared off somewhere. Maybe she looked back into 
azure shadowed woods. Maybe her ear cradled the hollow 
beat of hooves, her nose the odor of Cossacks, their approaching

horses. That fool teacher wanted me to write only Cossack poems 
when my ear was tuned by the swish of an old woman’s brush: 
Root to end, 100 hundred strokes, my bubby transformed, 

become Rapunzel. This was my miracle each evening. 
In the morning, she was all tight bun and business. 
Now cirrus wisps striate a milk-blue sky and, 

for the first time since your birth, the scent of earth screams 
spring, even as oil black ice clings to sidewalks. 
One day I’ll tell you about the burning bush, 

how Moses had to stop and look 
to see and hear the miracle. Today I point out the first 
crocus and your mouth shapes the O of crocus. I tell you 

how the hibiscus bush, hauled in from the patio late in fall, 
and which just last week I could have sworn I’d killed, 
was only sleeping. Now it presses watery green leaves

from dried stalks. Wesley, Look! 
it will flower again. Listen: There are two ways 
to live… as if nothing is a miracle… as if 

everything is. Let others live in dark forests, 
hoof beats of Cossacks their memories’ bass line. 
Let them wake each day and call that living. 

“Miracle,” Liz Abrams-Morley from Passager Issue 59.

Wendy Hoffman said, “I was in another country searching for my real self when I had this experience. The feeling is lasting.” Here’s what she wrote about it, “Birth-Day.”

On a forest path studded with hypnotic bouquets of wild red, yellow and purple 
emerging from a green carpet of shiny, pointed leaves, I feel a kiss slide and press 
in, though it is not physical. It coats my face and tells me I am someone’s child. 
I cannot tell whether this voice comes from my desperate inside warriors or the 
pregnant outside. As I thread over soft earth and ancient stone, a healthy umbilical 
cord descends from beyond a spotless sun through choppy clouds on azure. 
It is spring and my birthday. The air smells of swollen summer. 
After seventy tortuous, orphaned years, a pleasure joins to my barren lips. 
I walk in a light jacket along a squeezed path and belong.

“Birth-Day,” Wendy Hoffman, from Passager Issue 59.

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For Kendra, Mary, Christine, Rosanne, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.