“Just to have the freedom to go wherever I wanted,
and to not think something bad might happen to me.”
I try to step outside
freedom’s airy shelter
and look in through
the open windows of my day:
how I stroll from house
to road, unafraid,
and, heart unflinching,
open the box to withdraw
the mail, then
wave at a friendly honk
from a passing car.
Nothing worthy of note
along the way.
Or so it seems,
until I think of her:
how, alone that time in Amman
she heeded a warning
and boarded a plane
for San Francisco
then rode the bus for hours
just because she could,
rode and rode
all over San Francisco,
just because she could
maybe her thoughts
drifting to Fern, who
might be there too,
had she survived
the short ride from Baghdad.
Imagine how,
by habit of mind,
she might have
lowered her eyes
from a stranger’s gaze
then, stepping out,
surveyed
the sloping street
for any suspicious sign;
how she might have
smiled to herself then, that
being free and being safe would
take some getting used to
at least for as long
as she was here
how she might already
have known that
Duty would call her home.
I think of her as I sit down
on my porch of an evening,
to read a book
how heedlessly I surrender
to a world of make-believe,
how easy it is to take
this small freedom
for granted.
The breeze picks up
and I look around,
suddenly alert.
I bring my fingers
to my cheeks,
trying to imagine myself
inside her skin:
the breeze upon her face
as she waits for the bus
in San Francisco.
Suzanne Morris is a novelist with eight published works, and a poet. Her poems have appeared in several recent anthologies, and in online poetry journals including The New Verse News, The Texas Poetry Assignment, Stone Poetry Quarterly and The Courtship of Winds. She resides in Cherokee County, Texas.
THE CITY KEY 