Poetry by Emily Cosper
Emily Cosper lives and writes in New Orleans, her home for the past 33 years. She recently retired after a long career at Delgado Community College, where she served as both a Professor of English and an academic dean. Originally from Texas and Colorado, she hopes someday to divide her time between New Orleans and the American West. Her work has appeared in Porchlight: A Journal of Southern Literature and The Paddock Review. Her first poetry collection, Witness Before the Fall, will be published this summer by Finishing Line Press.
Come Home to Me
You see,
I asked Dr. John to come again,
And so he did
On a cool spring night.
He rode the chants
And conga beats
From down the street
Where a soul ascended too soon.
On this night,
The fallen’s tribe sang to their Mother
In white and sage and sacred blaze.
It smelled of prairie and prayer.
Those candles must have shimmered
Like the Milky Way.
A sonic bath of so-long sorrow
Washed the block in percussive waves.
I swear you could hear the ancestors’
sway like bamboo rustling in the breeze,
Arrived to guide the restless away.
I was in the back cleaning scraps
Of lace from an estate sale,
Wondering who was she who saved
This trunk of lace?
She cut it thoughtfully
From hem and sleeve
And heirloom edge.
What was it to be
Besides yellow and musty in a bin?
The Funk of MeeMaw
Long forgotten
Would soon rise again,
This I was sure.
It was then I heard
The otherworld.
He left as he came—
In a rush of stars and rhyme,
Rhythm without time.
I lingered.
A horn blew somber.
Lace fluttered from a line
Like a remnant of an
Ancient
Mystic
JuJuScene
Deep in a swamp.
Santos and ribbons,
Bottles and breeze
Call the spirits.
Please come home to me.
Winternoon in Arles
I want to see the light like Van Gogh
Watch it bend and blur and bounce
As it crosses the swamp Palmetto
And flickers through bare branches
Where an egret sits and remembers
I want to watch the light
Skim the cypress needles
carpeting the ground in heady mounds
Like after a storm,
Each fragrant step an intoxication
I want to write the sky blue as his room but outside
Clearcrisp
Like Winternoon in Arles
Or so I guess
Saturated and bright
Soul sated
By this fleeting light
Skimming the swamp
And self
refracted in silhouette and shadow
Shimmering
Like Starry Nights