Susan Delaney Spear: “Long Epiphany”
LONG EPIPHANY
You’ve been the one to do the heavy lifting.
Pianos and TVs. Rebuilding engines.
Painting peeling houses. Apologizing
after a painful argument. Sifting
through receipts. Making sad-me laugh.
Finding extra quilts on a sub-zero night.
Carefully untangling my gold necklace.
Driving on ice. Steering our slick-smooth life.
And then, your phone blinked blue with tragedy.
Our son was dead. “I won’t let you die, too,”
you said. And you have kept that weighty promise.
Now married forty years, I understand
that it’s been you, insuring I survive.
It’s always been you, keeping me alive.
Susan Delaney Spear is an Associate Professor of English at Colorado Christian University. Her poetry collection, Beyond All Bearing, was published by Wipf and Stock in 2018. A textbook, The Keys to the Treasure Chest (with David J. Rothman), is forthcoming from Springer.