apple breath, unforgettable…

Excerpt from “Joyas Voladoras” (“Flying Jewels”) by Brian Doyle (1956-2017)

as printed in The Sun, January 2020

“So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day,

an hour, a moment…

You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard

and cold and impregnable as you possibly can

and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance,

a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road,

the words I have something to tell you,

a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die,

the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand

in the thicket of your hair,

the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning

echoing from the kitchen

where he is making pancakes for his children.”

“Joyas Voladoras” also appeared in The American Scholar, Autumn 2004; in Children and Other Wild Animals by Brian Doyle, and in One Long River of Song by Brian Doyle, 2019.

For Brian Doyle, writing was an affair of the heart.

Reading Brian Doyle’s words is pretty much the same thing.

No one can forget a child’s apple breath…

* * * * * *

American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle…

Colin Woodard makes it easier to understand…(book review)

click here

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As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 free verse and haiku poems,

and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)

and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”