Poet of the Month

Irena Praitis

Irena Praitis is a professor of literature and creative writing at California State University, Fullerton. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Vilnius, Lithuania and has published two collections of verse, Touch (Finishing Line Press) and Branches (D-N Publishing), and a book of biographical prose vignettes, One Woman's Life (Diversion Press. She also co-wrote Still Life (Calder Wood Press), a collection of translated works by Lithuanian poet Sonata Paliulyte. Her latest collection of poems, Straws and Shadows, is out this month from Moon Tide Press.

I Had a Family

What with the wars, and the spread of sickness,
and women who sought to escape their shame,
orphans were not rare in the countryside.
I had not always lived as an orphan.
My father was always a ghost to me.
I'd stopped asking my mother about him,
but I can clearly recall my mother.
She always held her head high when we went
to market. I didn't know why people
whispered. I didn't see our life as strange.
The daughter of a single mother born
to the daughter of a single mother
surely kept the old gossips smoldering.
They sputtered on behind us as we walked.
Mama stood tall until the day she died.
I was six. Aunt and Uncle took me in.
I earned my keep laboring on their farm.
They were not really my aunt and uncle
but told me to call them that. So I did.
They never felt like family to me.
I knew what family was. I had one
once, and I held fast to that memory,
an orphan child in an orphan country,
not sure whose history to lay claim to.

---

Darkness

The sun set early in the wintertime.
We walked home from the school day in darkness.

I returned to work. I gathered the wood
for our evening fire. If no one had yet

gone for water, I went. I took the horse
and cart with a barrel to the river.

We kept a hole punched through the ice for water.
I filled the barrel bucket by bucket,

trying not to spill water on my skirt
or on my shoes. When I came back a hired

hand and I made sure to fill all the troughs
for the night. I touched the bristled foreheads

of the thirsty cattle that came to drink
even as we filled the trough. Tired, hungry,

I ate my bread and read my books for school,
crawled to bed, and fell asleep exhausted.