Being Seen: a poem by Rebecca Watkins

Found

In third grade, we released balloons with letters we’d written

tucked inside. We watched from our blacktop schoolyard,

dressed in plaid jumpers, faces upturned, as they became

colorful dots rising over the steeple of St. Francis Seraph church

where twice a week, we shuffled into the pews with bowed heads,

kneeled, clutched our hands, and prayed the words of children.

One day, a letter arrived in the mail, a reply to my letter in balloon

which had floated over 300 miles of roads and mountains

to land in the yard of a woman in West Virginia named Billie.

I was breathless with the thrill of being seen, being found.

Billie and I wrote to each other for a year; she in cursive

on stationery. I wrote in pencil on looseleaf.

She told me her children’s names and ages, that her husband

worked on power lines, and she was afraid when he drove off

during snowstorms. Now, I think of her, and wonder was she

like the woman I am now, busy with my life, lonely sometimes,

sometimes feeling both invisible and needed. Did she need

someone to tell her fears to or was it just kindness

when she wrote to a little girl she would never meet,

a girl on the verge of not believing, in God or herself?

Rebecca Watkins holds an MFA in poetry and an MSEd from the City University

of New York. Her poems have appeared in The Banyan Review, Sin Fronteras,

New Feather’s Anthology, The Roanoke Review, and Anderbo among other literary

journals. Her creative nonfiction has been shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s

Open Season Awards. She is the author of Field Guide to Forgiveness (Finishing Line

Press, 2023) and Sometimes, in These Places (Unsolicited Press, 2017).

December 2025 issue

SPIRIT FIRE REVIEW