Valentines: two poems by Don Narkevic

image by Renee Olmsted, on Pixabay, modified

Emerging Stone

Like Father’s unfinished life, the half-dressed

donated stone stands in the farm’s front yard

true as an oak. A traveling mason settles

for pasta and peas at the family cemetery.

The youngest daughter whispers Father’s name

in his hairy ear like a sad girlhood secret,

her tears pooling like stars

in his chip-pitted cheek.

Later, she studies his loose hold on the chisel,

the mallet, the reverberating skin

of the gray granite as the rock sings,

its voice carving into transient time

allowing light to enter as to a furrowed field,

down to earth’s bones or birth.

When she asks, he holds her hands to the chisel

as it surrenders to the hammer’s final blows.

For hours after the work ends,

she feels the fury resounding in her fingers

like the wind-rattled breath of eternal ancestry

or the gallop of her own heart.

                           *

Valentines

Supper ready, she waits

for Father, maybe working over,

maybe stopping at Roy’s Tavern,

maybe doing chores at the Marple’s,

Shirley’s husband dead

a respectable year.

From the kitchen window

she watches clouds

the color of dapple-gray horses

encroach, the threat of snow

a deepening bruise on the face

of a retreating cornflower sky.

She tugs on tight leather boots,

mud caking the rims, the treads

smooth, the size fitting her

years ago, when Father paid

three hours’ wages.

In the dusk of an outbuilding

she sizes a man’s black hat.

Her slender fingers tuck

runaway strands of hair

singed by a curling iron

forgotten on the wood stove,

hair that refuses to give way,

stubborn like Father

who imagines no need

for foolish things.

She reaches for the wheelbarrow.

A handle splinters her callused

palm. She will dig it out later

with the needle she used to sew

this dress she begged Father

to buy material for, red taffeta,

red as the raspberries growing

wild within a thicket of brier

along their farm road, berries

she picked, jellied, jarred,

and, to repay him, sold.

She tosses cinder from the belly

of the coal furnace into the barrow

scattering the contents on the

driveway like dead seed. While

spreading the third load, a burr

on the shovel slits her thumb.

She wipes the blood on her dress

like biscuit flour on an apron.

Northwest winds free fugitive

hairs that skim her flushed cheeks.

Looking uphill, she watches snow

glaze the heart-shaped stone

engraved with Mother’s name.

At fourteen she dwells

on the half-life spent without her,

no longer able to remember

the scent of Mother’s skin, fragrant

with soap she made from rose oil,

or the feel of her chestnut ringlets

as Mother kissed goodnight,

or the sound of her voice lulling

her through the bedroom door.

Her, in a red dress, maybe taffeta,

and a little girl, maybe seven,

the picture on the mantle.

Down the road Father slows

to watch a woman, motionless

except for the fabric of her dress,

red, reflecting the luster of a

Saturday losing ground to snow.

Reaching across the torn vinyl seat

he cradles seven roses on his lap,

speeds up, and whispers a name.

She runs inside and changes

out of her girl-foolish clothes.

From her bedroom window

she watches him walk uphill

through February snow, stop at

the heart-stone, and arrange

on the ground before his knees,

roses like the hem of a dress.

Don Narkevic lives in Buckhannon, West Virginia.

He has an MFA from National University. Recent

work appears in The Trillium, Agape, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Literature Today, and Spire Light.

In 2022, Main Street Rag published his novella of poetry entitled ‘After the Lynching.’ In 2024, The Potomac Playmakers produced his play, “From Birth.”

June 2025 issue