Insomnia

Why I am sitting in the living room
at 3:00 A.M.
eating graham crackers
in the dark.

Because insomnia is hard work, 
and even though I think of  people 
lying awake in anguish
losing loved ones, health, job or home,
(terrible things coming to me too
but not tonight as far as I know),
and even though I think of
poems about insomnia
written by excellent poets,
still, I’m weary and hungry
and a little depressed.
I remember myself, a Mennonite farm child
and dreamless ten hour nights in a snug bed
having graham crackers and milk for supper
Sunday evenings before all the family went
to church, comfort food of the homiest kind
So I am really okay
sitting here in the dark
with the crumbs coming down
on my nightgown
and into the carpet
where in the morning
the dog will sniff and search.

—Barbara Esch Shisler

There Is a Way

There is a way—There is always a way.
It may take ten lifetimes.
It may use up a sea of tears,
years spent sitting in the dark,

but the bent wisp of grass
will whisper direction,
a word in the world’s thesaurus
will rise from a page,
a fine, sharp blade
will find the space between joints.

There is a way—
There is always a way,

sifting, sifting with an aching back
till the glint of gold takes the eye;
the nudging at a door for
a crack and a ray and the scent of air.

There is a way,
There is always a way,
even the sweep of the mortician’s flame,
and the light bright gust upward.

—Barbara Esch Shisler

Longing for Freedom

I woke this morning
from a night of obsessed dreams
longing for freedom.

Life is restraint, constraint,
a tangle of attachments,
dealing out, grabbing back,
trading want and need.
Life is people living together,
holding on, holding in,
watching our step, stepping quick.

Maybe dying, I think as I peel
a banana and pour the milk,
maybe death is the sill to a freedom
so pure we are lifted into a light and
fragrant air, into color inconceivable,
into a new realm of joyful abandon
beyond boundary, let loose together.

I carry my breakfast to the porch
to watch the morning glories open.
Every day they astound my eyes
as I gaze into their perfect blue faces.
This morning a vine has leaped beyond
the top of the trellis and is wandering
back and forth in the empty air
with no place to cling.

—Barbara Esch Shisler, Telford, Pennsylvania, is a retired pastor who keeps faith with Frost’s comment that poetry provides “a momentary stay against confusion.”