Frostbite

Suzanne Morris

October 7, 2022

My sarcasm wounded a student today.

Afterward I heard him running down the stairs.

                  – from Frost Flowers, by Jane Kenyon

She has sometimes heard others

call them frost flowers,

the wild asters sprouting scattershot

in a field where the poet is

walking alone at dusk

...tired from teaching and a little drunk...

from words flung scattershot at a 

pupil who disappointed today and

who seemed deserving of

a lashing with her caustic tongue.

On the first day of class

my high school English teacher

raged at me for a question I asked

and maybe I deserved my

flaming cheeks, my pounding heart,

the hot tears bitten back till

afterward in the restroom.

And maybe the poet is as

wounded as her pupil as she

walks alone, up on the hill

above her home, amid the frost flowers

...looking at the dark windows below.

Let them be dark... she laments

as she hears

a large bird’s distressing cry

down-mountain:

I was cruel to him: it is a bitter thing....

For forty years, Suzanne Morris was a novelist, with eight published works beginning with Galveston (Doubleday, 1976) and most recently Aftermath - a novel of the New London school tragedy, 1937 (SFASU Press, 2016). Often her poetry was attributed to characters in her fiction. Nowadays she devotes all her creative energies to writing poems. Her work is included in the anthologies, No Season for Silence - Texas Poets and Pandemic (Kallisto GAIA Press, 2020), and the upcoming, Gone, but Not Forgotten, from Stone Poetry Journal. Her poems have also appeared in The New Verse News.