Their House

by Melanie Choukas-Bradley


It’s our cottage now
And yet you wondered last night
Over boiling corn, do they have tongs?

Your parents, so recently dead
Still slip through the rooms, quieter and kinder now
Your mother’s sugar bowl minus the martial timing of meals
Your father’s humming devoid of any annoyance

These naked wood walls are one hundred years old
As old as your parents would be, give and take
And they hold an artful and cluttered sweetness

Boxes stacked in the library would bother me if mine
We’ll get to them one summer, any intent no doubt slowed
By the treasures we’ll find

The New Yorker cartoons tacked to the bathroom door
Will never go
Sixty years old and counting

This cottage is all about the mountains beyond
Blue and looming
Massive inside their swirl of clouds and circling moons
Mute and immemorial


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Melanie Choukas-Bradley is a naturalist and award-winning author of seven nature books, including City of Trees, A Year in Rock Creek Park, Finding Solace at Theodore Roosevelt Island and The Joy of Forest Bathing. She began writing poetry during the pandemic and had the good fortune to discover Beate Sigriddaughter’s Writing in a Woman’s Voice. The site has featured many of her poems, including “How to Silence a Woman,” “If I have loved you,” and “The Water Cooler,” which won Moon Prizes. Her poetry has also appeared in New Verse News.