Judy Lechner

Memory

Like a childhood bully, the question appears out of nowhere
          to drag you under the water
          to watch you flail terrified
          as you search frantically
          for the lost person, place, thing, event.
It likes to see you squirm as you claw
          the dirty water, coughing out
          bits of garbage, your heart
          almost giving out till---
          slippery skinned as fishes,
          images shimmer to the surface.
Caught on your hook, words and pictures struggle on the line
          till you grasp them firmly in hand.
          You pull the memory from the
          brownish sludge and then
                    only then
          does it gift you with its names.


Ode To A Scrub Sponge

Humble helper
patiently scrubbing off the debris of living
how easily you erase the diversity of dirt
that mars your surface.
With the aid of improbably colored soaps
blue, green, red.
Our ancestors scraped skins, wood, clay
with knives lately bloodied with carnage.
We live within bubbles of cleanliness
that promise death to invisible adversaries
for millennia unimagined.
How clean we are
with our lifetimes tripled from the ancient thirty.
In large part due to you, guardians of our stomachs.
Ancient killers subdued,
we are infected with newer enemies
slowly producing the same inevitable effect.


About the Author

Judy Lechner wrote her first poem at age 10 and will, with the least encouragement, recite it for you. She has been a featured reader in many venues in Ulster County and is a longtime member of the poetry groups: Goat Hill Poets for over 20 years and has read in many of their performances, Woodstock Poetry Society, and Poets House in New York. Her poetry collection The Moon Sings Back was published in 2011 and her poems have appeared in Chronogram. Half Moon Review, ASK 25, Home Planet News, Jews, Green Heron, Liteary Gazette and in Tattoo where she won a prize for her haiku. She is a retired reading and English teacher and was an editor and writer for Macmillan and Scholastic among other publishers for 45 years.

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