Long gone, those days
on blankets of yellow leaves.
I kept my eyes shut against shame.
Today’s Mayflowers open me.
Too late; you’ve vanished,
your sardonic mouth,
the one from which
I longed to hear a little miracle.
Somewhere, my lost tormentor,
I think there’s a heaven.
Bertha Rogers’s poems have been published in literary journals and anthologies and in several collections, among them Heart Turned Back (Salmon, 2011) and Wild, Again (Salmon, 2019). Her translation of Beowulf (Birch Brook Press) was published in 2000; and her translation of the riddle-poems from the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book was published in 2019 (Six Swans Artist Editions).
