Water Goddess

You walk on fields of mustard seed alone
as yellow bounces light within your eyes
while Heaven’s sending ribbons—now you’ve flown.
Is this the way it feels when beauty dies?
You speak in echoed whispers as you go,
while hearing psalms from portholes in the leaves.
I’ve heard another’s voice that I don’t know
an aria that hums in every breeze.
It tells of wading time through shallow lakes
somewhere between a cluster of bamboo—
whose flower grows so beautiful but takes
one hundred years to bloom a lovely hue.
Last night I had a dream you slowly crept
beyond the waters’ shore, and so I wept.

***

Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas is currently enrolled in the Vermont College of Fine Arts, MFA in Writing program. She is a ten-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a seven-time Best of the Net nominee. In 2012 she won the Red Ochre Chapbook Contest, with her manuscript, Before I Go to Sleep. In 2018 her book  In the Making of Goodbyes was nominated for a national book award, and her poem A Mall in California took 2^nd place for the Jack Kerouac Poetry Prize. In 2019 her chapbook An Ode to Hope in the Midst of Pandemonium was a finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Awards. In 2020, two of her sonnets were given Honorable Mention in the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition. Her new book Alice in Ruby Slippers, is forthcoming from Aldrich Press. She has been the featured poet at countless venues, with her work appearing most recently at Mezzo Cammin and Verse Daily. She is the Co-Editor-in-Chief for the Tule Review and former Editor-in-Chief for The Orchards Poetry Journal.