Tuesday (and)
by C. Delia Scarpitti

My poetry streams in thin vignettes

Dashed ruthlessly to the page

While the baby is sleeping or

Turning his face – folding inward to my breast –

The little girl does her art in the sunny back room

And I furtively coat thin paper

With Roman symbols no one will ever see…

Every day – another birth

Scanty couplets punctuated

by his outraged crying and her ponderous questions

her blue-eyed pleading for one more glass of milk

his soft-soled padding across the hardwood floor…

Time moves in moments – not minutes –

This sibling rivalry so unlike Cain and Abel’s best…

My babies must share Mommy with her cats-in-a-cradle clutch

On a fine ink pen

Her impending need to create w/ words

No less messy or painful than their crowning heads

And gravitational pull…

Poems snarled with tangled wet bed sheets—

Another Summer day

On the drying line…