Jenny Ward Angyal
The Long View
Fritillaries dance among the milk thistle. Where the meadow rises to meet the forest, a wooden bench-swing rocks gently, suspended from the branches of a spreading white oak. I gaze back down the valley. This will be my last hike for a long while—until I get my new knee, until it heals. Maybe next year, my seventy-fifth, I’ll make it to all the way to the summit. But this time I turn back at a clearing spangled with coreopsis and wild sunflowers. As I descend the narrow, wooded trail, I brush shoulders with a woman climbing up, carrying a heavy baby in a sling across her chest. The child, still tugging at his mother’s milky nipple, looks up, and for a moment our eyes meet.
mountains coming and going in the blue mist
About the Author
Jenny Ward Angyal is the author of several collections of tanka, tanka sequences, tanka-prose, and haibun. Her books are available on Amazon. She currently serves as Global Moderator of Inkstone Poetry Forum.