Lucy''s Gift / For a Time by Frederick Wilbur

Lucy’s Gift

Home between semesters,
she waits tables on a busy Friday
evening at Vito’s Pizzeria
in our Blue Ridge Mountain village;
mountains older than the Roman Empire.

Smiling, face glistening, she
bustles from booth to booth.
The pre-football game crowd
is animated, noisy; the pizza
take-out line is nearly out the door.

A woman, only a few years older,
with two squirmy kids, notices
the tattoos on her arm—
hummingbird and lily-of-the-valley—
and kindly admires them.

They’re for my grandfather, Lucy explains.
Oh, so sorry he has passed,
the woman whispers like a secret
the other customers don’t need to know.

No, no, he’s still alive, Lucy states factually,
delivering the check and piling
empty plates with an efficient clatter.

The woman leaves a tip she cannot afford,
writes on the receipt, “to help with funeral expenses.”




For a Time

There is nothing to be gained from loss. Twyford James

Puny raspberries dropped by drought,
makes picking them a meaningless effort.
Though concentrated in flavor no doubt,
we sacrifice the reward of a prized quart

to foraging deer. Grief has no sell-by
date or self-help renewal to wholesome
apology or well-phrased alibi.
To heal hurt, we must accept the tedium

of this season and hope for consolation.
Harvest is always racing against rot
which infects as a desperate addiction.
As pure as grief can be, it is not

a sure anodyne soothing all sorrow,
but a might of mercy we can only borrow.

Frederick Wilbur’s poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out, Conjugation of Perhaps and The Heft of Promise. He is poetry co-editor for Streetlight Magazine. His work appears in The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Mackinaw: a journal of prose poetry, New Verse News, One Art: a journal of poetry, Shenandoah, The South Carolina Review, and The Southern Poetry Review. He was awarded the Stephen Meats Poetry Prize for best poem of the year by Midwest Quarterly (2018).