Community Voices

By Tish Davis
Concord Township, Ohio, USA

A few rose petals have fallen away from the vase that rests on the patient’s night table. I add water to rejuvenate the stems, but it’s hopeless. The flowers are dead.

The elderly woman tells me that she enjoyed watching the flowers change. She always grew roses in her garden.  She drifts into detail—of pouring boiling water over the soil to sterilize it, of covering flats with a screen to protect the grains from mice and ants.  Sometimes, the containers would spend a second winter outside to give the slower seeds another chance to germinate.

At the beginning of autumn, she’d return each tool to its proper hook in the potting shed then relax on the porch swing with her husband. By now she is unable to stay awake. The light changes.  As she naps, I notice that the roses donated by our church have dried perfectly.

bells
beyond the garden
the garden beyond

 first published in Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose 2 (December 2009)

By Tish Davis
Concord Township, Ohio, USA

Lake Erie—blue water and sky become one. I sit in the sand not far
from the place along the channel where my father and I used to fish.
The beach is smaller now, cluttered with garbage cans and signs.
The driftwood too, scattered along the edge, entangled with leaves and
plastic bottles.

The gulls return again and again to the edge of the pier as they did
when we cast our lines. My father would tell the same story every time
I was bored. The Iroquois, a confederation of five nations — Seneca,
Cayuga, Onodaga, Oneida, Mohawk—defeat the Eries . . .

I remember our bobbers rocking back and forth in these waters—

the only legacy that bears their name.

receding tide
another feather
stranded

first published in Ink, Sweat, & Tears, May 14, 2008