On Reading an Old Copy of The New Yorker
The frayed copy with its themed cover,
had a horned Pan playing his pipes,
casually leaning against an innocuous
city wall. The trees’ leaves were lime
green. It was from before the war,
before the second election gave half
of us so much grief. In the front,
I noticed Harold Bloom’s public talk
on Shakespeare, then read an excellent
treatise on problems of a military plan
in Iraq, whoever wrote it, thought war
would be horrific. It was nice to be
back in the past. I read a nice poem on
Erinnea of ancient Telos near Greece
and the island of Lesbos. It was a lovely
hour of reading. There still was hope.
We were not burned and burdened
by high waters and earthquakes. Red
and blue weren’t fighting words. I was
still a mother of young girls, innocent of
preteen playground politics, my husband
and I were talking, the fights to come hadn’t
happened, my father alive, my sister full
of hope she could beat her terminal cancer.
Mary C. O'Malley has a MFA from Spalding University. She is a mother of five and has practiced Social Work for over twenty years. She has been published both on and offline. Some of the sites she has been in are PoetryCemetary.com, PoetryMidwest, Wordsmyth. In the past she has been published in The Mid America Poetry Review and will be in the spring issue of Cleveland State University's Whiskey Island.