Join The Dillydoun Review in celebrating National Poetry Month with

A Poem by Marjorie Levine

You with your constant smell of indifference
And I so hungry for even a sweet side glance.

But it was not to happen.
Maybe it was fate on the snowy evening I sailed
Away from you:
The last night I entered that ferry
The same ferry that always took me back to you
Because I was seduced by silly things
That never mattered.

I must have looked so crumbled, so forlorn,
That a nun stopped reading the Bible and moved
To sit closer to me, to give me comfort
And solace… and she did.

As I drifted the waters to reach my home
You disappeared and grew smaller in every way
Possible, so in many of my later years you
Became a blurred washed memory.

And after a great time, when my forgotten passion
Surfaced and took hold of me,
When the longing that once lived inside of me
Cornered my thoughts and turned you into a rumination,
I tried to find you.

But you were gone.
Really gone.
And there was a heavy stillness in my place.
On cold nights, I remembered the ferry and
All I could hear was the nun,
The nun who so many years ago told me:
“You will still be here
In the morning.”

Marjorie Levine was a teacher for 35 years and she is now 74 years old and retired. In 2009, she was the 1st place winner, in a Beat Poetry Contest, for her poem, “What Way to Go Today”. Her poem, “Coda”, was published in Pinky Thinker Press in February 2021.