Roots, by Becky DeVito

Eternity of Magnolia, by Tetiana Pchelnykova (Ukraine) 2024

​Roots
 
You—all of you—promised
God never gives us
more than we can handle.
Isn’t suicide proof
the disease in my brother’s head
had no place
in your paint-by-numbers world?
 
There is so much beauty
in God’s creation.
The view you offer
hurts my eyes, seen from here
outside the lines.
 
In my solitude, I see
a single raindrop,
and myself in it.
It rests for a moment
on a magnolia leaf, then
 
having fallen so far 
it gathers itself once more
for the rest of its journey
to the earth, where it will
begin the cycle again,
drawn up through the tiny
passageways of roots.
 
From there it will ascend
to green the leaf, washing
and then painting
the world anew.
 
Becky DeVito
 
Becky DeVito has used poetry as a means of working her way through trauma. Her experiences writing poetry led her to investigate the ways in which poets come to new insights through the process of drafting and revising their poems for her doctoral dissertation. She is a psychology professor at the Capital campus of CT State Community College in Hartford, Connecticut. Her poems have been published in Atlanta Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Naugatuck River Review, The New Verse News, Ribbons: Tanka Society of America Journal, and others. Join her on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.