The Work of Holding On
By Janet Blair
We are camping in January.
Scurrying away from the post-holiday silence of empty bedrooms.
Borrowing, for a few nights, a state park lot where we can shrink to essentials
and fill our lungs with now.
Winged Elms decorate our campsite, their naked limbs stretching and yawning overhead,
revealing the slim corky sails that give them their name.
They seem stark and appropriately subdued for the season.
Still, being Florida, the elms are surrounded by saw palms, outnumbered by live oaks
and shaded by southern magnolias.
All standing stubborn in their greenness, refusing to be undone.
Leaves lifted up to a sky that is rarely not blue.
Seemingly fierce in their determination to outlast the stunted days,
unwilling to acquiesce to a vibrant orange, a shock of yellow, or shriveled brown.
Instead, they cleave to what they know.
Green has never failed them.
The Canvas of This Evening
By Janet Blair
Tell me there is anything
anything at all more beautiful
than this watercolor pastel glow
spreading across the Pass-A-Grille sky
then swirling to a molten, red-tinged orange
and exploding lava-like onto the canvas of this evening.
Tell me each evening has been the same
across the miles and decades since I stood
age seven beside Grandma on Anastasia Island,
her bending to hold a bleached conch shell to my ear
asking if I could hear the ocean surging inside
then giving it to me to pack in my suitcase at the end of summer.
Tell me that science can explain it all.
That what I saw as the sun sliding down tonight
was simply the earth rotating.
That what I heard in the conch shell long ago
was just trapped air, echoing ambient sounds
inside a displaced casing.
That what I took as treasure, was merely
created to surround a mollusk in safety.
Tell me that there is no magic—
when what I know is that even in a
landlocked state like Texas or Idaho,
or wherever my family wandered next,
I could press my ear against the smooth
outer lip of that husk and always hear
the echoing sound of home.
Janet Blair lived in Trinidad, Germany, Ecuador and Guam along with several states across the U.S. before finding her home in the city of St Pete almost three decades ago.
Currently, Janet holds a position as a policy analyst for the State of Florida and spends her weekends writing poetry. Her most recent and upcoming work can be found in The Orchards Poetry Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, New Verse News, The Florida Bards Anthology and The Eckerd Review.
