My friend asks me to write a poem for her birthday. It’s a big one, she tells me, noting that it gets more difficult to believe how far you’ve journeyed with each year’s passing. I get that, I tell her. Live in hope, die in despair, my mother used to say. Her family’s hardscrabble struggle for a life worth living punctuated by Red Dirt memories: my mother’s sharp laugh; the slight shrug of her shoulders; the sun; the earth; the clouds. As if she were just saying, Well, I’m still here. As if, one way or another, we all still are.

Candlemas—
shadows and light cast
into the world

Bio: Margaret Dornaus