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.  He was awarded the Stephen Meats Poetry Prize for best poem of the year by Midwest Quarterly (2018).