Jeanie Thompson

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Jeanie Thompson

River, Bridge, and Sky

Aboard the Asama Maru, North Pacific Ocean, April 14, 1937

At 6 a.m. a mist floated around the ship

like incense from a burner.

Polly and I take our last walk

on deck. Both silent, we know

what the other is thinking—

this is Teacher’s birthday.

We practice the speeches,

ready ourselves to pose.

“Plucking the flower of life,”

the Chinese say of death.

Today, I think of you as a lotus flower,

opening in the morning with curving petals

and leaves whose surfaces reflect

every mood of sky. I think

of those who will say behind their hands,

She who doesn’t know light,

much less a flower, writes this?

Before we set sail, a gift:

the cast of your hand.

Reaching for

what I knew I could never

find again – that electric touch –

the thumb and index finger

forming the letter L –

I traced

each line in your palm,

startlingly distinct and true.

Teacher, you made a path for me.

A small, well-tended

garden, with turns

for river, bridge and sky.

The world knows

you opened my hand

and names flew into the air.

But who can know

how you touched me

with your sight –

Begged me

promised I would see...

Poem note: Partially found and partially imagined, the reference to the cast of Anne Sullivan Macy’s hand, the lotus, and the garden come from Helen Keller’s Journal, entries in March and April, just before the trip to Japan.

The Myth of Water: Poems from the Life of Helen Keller

Poet and essayist Jeanie Thompson is the author of The Myth of Water: Poems from the Life of Helen Keller, The Seasons Bear Us, White for Harvest: New and Selected Poems, Witness, and How to Enter the River. Her poetry and essays on the writing life have been published in Old Enough: Southern Women Writers and Artists on Creativity and Aging, Tributaries, Creativity and Compassion, Whatever Remembers Us, High Horse, Working the Dirt, All Out of Faith, The Best of Crazyhorse, and The Southern Poetry Anthology: Volume X: Alabama. In 2023 Jeanie retired as Executive Director Emerita of the Alabama Writers’ Forum and in June of that year she received the Albert B. Head Legacy Award from the Alabama State Council on the Arts for her work as a literary arts advocate and award-winning poet. Jeanie has been a poetry faculty member of Spalding University's Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing since 2002. She lives in Montgomery, Alabama.