Poetry

Reuters photo

By

Judy Alexander Brice

Glass Ceilings: 9/11/01

They ran for all their might,

These women of the world,

Who had worked overtime to climb

Through their glass ceilings.

Accountants, executives, do-it-all women,

Families at home, children in day care,

Husbands beside them—

Partners in progress,

Stockbrokers, secretaries,

They knew the ropes:

Breakfast at five,

Dressed by six,

Children up by seven,

Out of the house by eight,

At work by nine, sharp!

And then the unimaginable:

Fire   Cacophony   Chaos!

Their glass ceilings came crashing down.

In the maelstrom of smoke and limbs

They scrambled down the stairs

Then ran for their lives,

Clutching their purses.

Tears— Harvey, Irma and Chiapas

Tonight heavy now the leaves

judder their drops

heavy into morning they tear

they tear the fronds off

their palms, their plaintive boughs

until nothing is left

nothing but silence shears

the air

the quivering of a lone mare

her shaking

the quivering and silence

His Butterfly Effect

Try to keep your heart,

save it, keep it open

as the door you lost last year

when the falling oak pummeled

your home, drove limbs

through her windows.

Save in your mind their former

view, your garden— the cobalt

Hydrangeas, the Asiatic

Lilies, bending over their own

giant Ferns, as they leaned

to protect the violet Hostas, tightly

holding silent hands with their

best and variegated friends.

Try to keep your heart,

save it, hold it close,

when the brusque and ill-

tempered Bombast walks

through your country and acts

as if he owns it all, acts like he

is free to turn the states he governs

into the mud flats of your yard—

into possessions he own— free

to pulverize the flowers’ lives,

eradicate the butterflies,

the Monarchs.

Try to keep your heart.

Inspired by Lynne Knight from Rattle‘s Poets Respond, January 3, 2017

“Try to Keep your Heart Open”

The butterfly effect is the concept that small causes can have large effects. Initially, it was used with weather prediction but later the term became a metaphor used in and out of science. In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.

Judy Alexander Brice

Judy Brice is a retired Pittsburgh psychiatrist whose love of nature, experiences with illness, both her own and that of her patients, has informed much of her work. Her poems have appeared previously in The Paterson Literary Review, in The Lyric and many Pittsburgh and national publications. Judy’s collected poems have appeared in Renditions in a Palette, published in 2013 by David Robert Books. More recently a number of Judy’s poems have appeared in Versewrights.com and a poem of hers has appeared recently in Vox Populi. One of her poems has been set to music by Tony Manfredonia, and Judy and Tony are looking for a quintet to perform the piece.