Frontier

Pity has no place in love
or so I thought,
till Pity came
and staked a claim
on our land.

Pity had no place in love
till you convulsed
from the effort of lying down,
and our land fell
stunned, mute, empty
a sudden desert
where our homestead once stood.

and Pity’s claim?
a humble spring
a quiet watering
at home
in this wasteland.

—Julie Cadwallader-Staub lives near Burlington, Vermont, and currently serves as the Grants Director for the Burlington School District. Her poems have been published in several journals, featured on Garrison Keillor’s "The Writer’s Almanac," and included in anthologies. She was awarded a Vermont Council on the Arts grant for poetry in 2001. She and her husband, Warren, were married for 23 years until his death from multiple myeloma at age 49. This poem is excerpted from her first collection of poems, Face to Face (Cascadia/DreamSeeker Books, 2010).