My mother made herself the deer with a broken leg
We saw a deer through the pane into someone else’s yard. The leg moved like a tube sock pinned to the hip and half filled with sticks. I did not like to see it suffer,
either. She was upset —my mother —that no one helped the doe. Was it a mother, too? As if we were the first to observe the scene. We weren’t. All had been told to
let her be. My mother had suffered a destruction of the self, a divorce, and no one cared. That wasn’t true. We were grown, on our own. I agree it was hard. Yet
in those moments of a cold November day, we watched a doe, disabled and enduring, walk across a yard and eat a hedge. I wish she could have seen it like that.
Amy Holman is the author of the collection, Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window (Somondoco Press, 2010) and four chapbooks, including the prizewinning Wait for Me, I’m Gone (Dream Horse Press, 2005). Recent poems have been in or accepted by Blueline, concis, Gargoyle, The Westchester Revie…
We saw a deer through the pane into someone else’s yard. The leg moved like a tube sock pinned to the hip and half filled with sticks. I did not like to see it suffer,
either. She was upset —my mother —that no one helped the doe. Was it a mother, too? As if we were the first to observe the scene. We weren’t. All had been told to
let her be. My mother had suffered a destruction of the self, a divorce, and no one cared. That wasn’t true. We were grown, on our own. I agree it was hard. Yet
in those moments of a cold November day, we watched a doe, disabled and enduring, walk across a yard and eat a hedge. I wish she could have seen it like that.
Amy Holman is the author of the collection, Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window (Somondoco Press, 2010) and four chapbooks, including the prizewinning Wait for Me, I’m Gone (Dream Horse Press, 2005). Recent poems have been in or accepted by Blueline, concis, Gargoyle, The Westchester Revie…
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