Dream Sonnet 3: Mother, Crater Lake

She contemplates her mirror-self, dead still

the afternoon air. No grasshoppers sing.

Lake limpid, a bowl of blue glass, a womb

too cold to swim. Volcano collapsed.

On the water’s surface, foliage floats

like debris in the fluid of an eye.

Below, tiny crustaceans sieve the depths,

diaphanous as foetuses, feeding.

 

She is lost to me, inhabits some new

element, a place inconceivable

to a metaphor mind. One breath will affirm

her long fall from this dream into another.

Barbara Black was a double semi-finalist in the 2011 Writer’s Union of Canada Short Fiction Contest. Her writing recently appeared in FreeFall Magazine and Love in the Time of Predators (Leaf Press, 2012), a chapbook edited by Patrick Lane. Both the soon-to-be released anthology Poems from Planet Earth and the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts will feature her work. She lives in Victoria with her philosopher and cat.