Mountainsides, by Shelly Blankman

Photo by Joshua Blankman (USA). Contemporary.

Mountainsides

I swaddled you in dreams from birth
of health and happiness,

of honeysuckle days and lightning bug nights,
maybe someday Duke or Yale.

For now, your frame too tiny, too frail
for  the massive canvas of colours

that would paint your life.
Cruising and crawling melted

into days of dangling from
paper-thin twigs on wintering trees.

But by the first snowflake of your
seventh year, your  boots stood dry

in your closet while you lay in bed
for weeks drenched with fever. Illness
.
we did not understand  robbed you
of school days and playground games,

biking, bowling, parties, and sleepovers
with friends. Poking and prodding, tests and

guesses were your life now, and finally
treatment with promise of snowy boots next winter.  

Your  sweet childhood was now your Everest,
with every crag and crevice a boulder, every

step an avalanche of fear, the distant peak
poking through greying clouds like

a beckoning finger, your damaged health
 a relentless, blustery thunderstorm.

We didn't know the hardest part of climbing
was never reaching the top. Not really.

It  was the  sides.
It was always the sides.

Shelly Blankman

Shelly Blankman and her husband Jon fill their empty nest in Columbia, Maryland  with 4 cat rescues. They have two sons, one in New York  and one in Texas. After a stint as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the at Marshall University , she followed a career path in journalism and public relations, but her first love has always been poetry. She has been published previously in The Ekphrastic Review, as well as Visual Verse, Verse-Virtual, Silver Birch Press, Poetry Superhighway, and Praxis Magazine.

Photo by Joshua Blankman (USA). Contemporary.