Poetry ~ Marianne Mersereau Miracle in the Chicken Coop Chapel “With God, all things are possible.” ~Jesus (Matthew 19:26) I’m sure many miracles took place in the chickens’ home- like the narrow escape from a fox or snake, but the one that stands out is the tongue that was reattached. My aunt tells the story this way: How her sister fell and sliced her tongue almost completely off. My grandmother picked her up and ran into the chicken coop, praying in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost as the hens squawked their praise in that sacred space. The torn tongue was made whole again. When you live far from the doctors and you don’t have a car nor money to pay them, you learn to believe in impossibilities. ~ What You Can Do when you have to will surprise you. My mother assures me of this- her story as proof. Raised on less than a dime in a house with no indoor plumbing, her father died when she was nineteen, his neck broken in a car wreck. She never talked about him much, just did what she had to do: joined the Women’s Army Corps, served as a post-WWII nurse. Of the wounded soldiers she said, They just kept coming. I surprised myself a few times doing what I had to do. I trace the letter M on my palm: Letting her go was hardest. ~ War Ghosts in the Attic We grew up hearing the story of the wooden legs and how they used to be in the attic of our old farmhouse and got up to walk around at night. They belonged to the former owner, a Veteran of WWI who lost his real legs on a battlefield in France. My father tried to convince my mother that the attic sounds were mice, but they haunted her, so he burned them in a bonfire and the attic became quiet but the ghosts from my father’s past kept walking through his dreams, crying out in his sleep, reminding him of how he’d lost pieces of his right leg on a battlefield in WWII. ~ He Was Most Afraid of Lightning Not of tumbling on the tractor getting bitten by a copperhead running out of money having no health or crop insurance losing the tobacco plants to cut worms, black shank disease or drought. No, my father feared the dark clouds electric air, flattened fields cows sheltering underneath trees the sudden jagged flash of red orange yellow missile searching the ground for the tallest target. We sat once on the porch watching a storm, saw a lone hay bale on a distant field become a torch and my brother recalled the terror of being struck while riding his bike, stunned that he was alive to tell us about it. ~ Pearl Harbor Just another sunny day - like December 7, 1941 was just another day. Aloha, Daddy, I speak into the cell phone. He’s eighty-four and far away. I try to imagine him here after the bombing, his ship leaving for Okinawa. He tells me that was a long time ago. You want a souvenir, perhaps a cap? His souvenir is the scar on his leg, seared into memory. Forty days in the hospital like Jesus in the desert. As kids, we knew which side of his lap could not hold us. I buy him a cap that he wears with pride, try to feel his footprints on Waikiki- Give thanks his name is not on the memorial. ~ ![]() Marianne Mersereau grew up in the Southern Highlands of Appalachia and currently resides in the Pacific Northwest. She is the author of the chapbook, Timbrel (Finishing Line Press, 2013). Her writing has appeared in The Hollins Critic, Bella Grace, Entropy, Still Point Arts Quarterly, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Deep South Magazine, Seattle’s Poetry on Buses, and elsewhere, and is anthologized in Public Poetry Houston’s Anthology, Enough. She was awarded a Second Place Prize in Artists Embassy International’s Dancing Poetry Contest in 2018.
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