Sleeping Beauty

Headlights circle the bedroom casting 
shadows that beckon like repentant ghosts. 
The last bus rumbles by a block away,
and suddenly it’s May again.

I drift into a restless sleep 
and dream I'm sitting in a golden 
Adirondack chair in unmown grass 
behind a castle my father built 
watching a wolf capture and kill a dog. 

My brothers have fled, my mother
has become voiceless 
and only I will ever know 
how hard I tried to find a way 
to stay in all of it,

and still do, even as I wander 
in that place, sorting through 
shelves and drawers and cupboards 
and climbing rickety wooden stairs 

that wind and crack and splinter 
as I step into a hidden attic where 
I finally find myself again --
an old woman spinning yarn. 

This poem is inspired by the work of Marie Howe who recently won the 2025 Pultizer Prize for Poetry for her retrospective, What the Earth Seemed to Say: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2024), which was first published in the US by W.W. Norton as New and Selected Poems.