To Avalon
One Holy Saturday I drive
with my mother sixty years
into the past, wide highway
giving way to coastal road
time and space unspooling
moving us away from now
in the light of the years
to the beginning of time
sixty years like yesterday
a shoal rising from memory
a bridge over a marshy bay
a shore town in April light
stories of my childhood
looking for turtles in sand
her young motherhood
my father’s undefeated dream:
a house by the sea, all summer,
a growing family, all gathered,
a thousand stories, a victory
every day until the day you die
my mother beside the ocean
growing younger in shore light.
….
This poem is from the chapbook The Cinder Path by Jim Garrett (Finishing Line Press), and is available at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/the-cinder-path-by-james-garrett/
The #poems inThe Cinder Path are quiet journeys down illuminating paths that look back in time to memories of beaches and baseball and forward in time to realities of #illness and #aging. Whether as boyhood adventures, #family tales, or adult wanderings, these poems begin at endings of paths and end at beginnings of new paths, but each journey in The Cinder Path sets out in search of the right path for living between a lost past and an unknown future with the hope of finding love.
Jim Garrett has taught literature and writing for more than forty years. The Cinder Path (2024) is Jim Garrett’s fourth poetry chapbook published by Finishing Line Press.
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