Michela Costello
Worth Noticing
If no one speaks of remarkable things
they leave. Like the slow rise and exit
after a meal. We walk away untransformed
a small miracle just escaped.
I watch you eat like a prayer
with every delicate turn, deliberate.
Slowly lifting silver to your lips
your mouth is a red boat
on silent water.
Elegy
Thoughts of you are swollen sighs
leaving enough air to breathe in
but little left
to give back.
Like fragments
we are forming
an incomplete essay
on love and longing
peeling paper
marking margins
with only afterthoughts.
Your back
curled up and turned
away from me
on the bed
a closed parenthesis
not wanting to let me
inside your whisper.
I once prayed
to remember
that beautiful things
take time.
And so this story
continues slowly
undone -
You are your own poem.
I carve my words
without you now.
Lesson
My hope is in the old woman
at the end of my street
who moves and removes
the brown bags from her car
with one memory one breath
and one careful effort,
like cleaning a glass,
one touch at a time.
My solitude lies across the lane
in the sad blue house
where a man plays his violin,
through every night,
like a root waiting
to be plucked from the dusty years,
the soil of everyday silence.
And standing here,
in these middle years,
I know with inevitable certainty,
that on every street,
across from loneliness,
lives harmony.
It is here I learn
that not too far from endurance
lies peace.
It is a constant steadiness
that will never leave us
if we walk
with our arms wide open.
If we learn to balance,
with patience,
our groceries
and our songs.
Michela A. Costello is an English teacher and writer in Washington, DC. She can usually be found acting out Shakespeare or poring over poems with students in her high school classroom. After years of grading other people’s writing, she finally decided it was time to start submitting her own. She is currently pursuing MFA programs.