still a child, after years of believing
the role of church was to give out scoldings,
to plant seeds of you-are-not-good-enough
inside my fertile, waiting fields
my Aunt Vera told me God loves me
making me stop in my tracks, in shock
as this was the most soul-rousing
news I had ever heard
changing me from that moment on to expect
so much good, to believe that even the holes
in my doughnuts had reason for me to be glad
and from then on, I couldn’t help wanting to tell
more shell-shocked people that every second
on their clocks had a seed waiting to be
dropped into their circumstances
so when I was old enough, standing in front of
a huge rushing waterfall, I asked my little nephew
if he knew who made this masterpiece, and when
he answered, “mens,” I knew this was his moment,
when time and foolhardiness would stand still for him
I told him God made it just for us because he loves
us so much, and I saw that look in his eyes, and I
knew these living waters would never stop finding
their way to the sees of so many waiting deeps
Susan Shea is a retired school psychologist who was raised in New York City, and is now living in a forest in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. Since she has returned to writing poetry this year, her poems have been accepted in a few dozen publications, including Ekstasis, Across the Margin, Feminine Collective, Persimmon Tree Literary Magazine, Military Experience and the Arts, and the Avalon Literary Review.
