Yvette Neisser Moreno is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The International Poetry Review, The Potomac Review, Tar River Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Her translation (from Spanish) of Argentinean Luis Alberto Ambroggio’s Difficult Beauty: Selected Poems was published by Cross-Cultural Communications in 2009. In addition to working as a professional writer/editor, Moreno teaches poetry and translation at the Writer's Center and has taught poetry in public schools in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.
Fall 2009
Table of Contents - Vol. V, No. 3
Yvette Neisser Moreno
for Dottie May
I should have known
when the magnolias died in frost
that it would be her last spring---
the way the blossoms hung on for weeks,
brown and wilted, shrouding the house
with their flitting petal shadows.
She had taken to wandering the yard
as if surveying the inches of grass
and patches of garden, each flowering plant
she had tended these fifty years. She no longer
called to me across the fence
to show me something of beauty---
a budding hydrangea, a ripening fig
or a praying mantis
crouched among daffodils,
perched on its forelegs
in a position of total alertness,
total tranquility.
From under the earth, like lava, like oil,
like boiling water through a geyser,
they emerge
From seventeen years of darkness
beneath our feet, from that humming
from feeding on roots
they push through the surface
to sunlight, tree trunks,
telephone poles, flower stems
where they cling and wait,
sing and wait.
© Yvette Neisser Moreno
