Connemara Wadsworth: “My Dear”
MY DEAR
The yellow mangos are in season—
I bought two bright as the sun
in a child’s tempera painting.
How many wonderful mornings
was the table set for breakfast
with the golden fruit.
How you sliced them, the oblong pit
left for me to scrape clean with my teeth,
how you often gave me the best half.
Even if I switched them you’d
tell me you wanted me to have
the unbruised piece.
Today I open one perfect succulent fruit,
I’ll eat only half, slide the plate with
its mate to the empty place where
you’d sat so many mornings, and me,
aching to be with you again—so golden
and sweet season after season.
Connemara Wadsworth‘s chapbook, The Possibility of Scorpions, about the years her family lived in Iraq in the early 50’s, won the White Eagle Coffee Store Press 2009 Chapbook Contest. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Solstice, Chautauqua, Bellevue Literary Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. Her poem, “Mediation on a Photo,” was a winner of The Griffin Museum of Photography’s Once Upon a Time: Photos That Inspire Tall Tales.