The Door | My Ancestors Cries

By Dianna Vagianos Armentrout

The Door

for Dr. Sherry Reiter

Sitting in poetry therapy peer group Sherry says

The only certainty in life is change

.

Stunned between one person’s nervous breakdown

and another’s stage three lung cancer, I believe her.

She doesn’t say Humans have an indomitable spirit.

She doesn’t say You’ll get to the other side of their illnesses.

I walk toward   I step through       the door—

        the door.

My Ancestors Cries

Keep me from forgetting

myself. The wolf howls

and the moon swells

towards me.

Moonbeam light dances

on leaves, songfullness

from the owl.

Windchime love

shifts from beyond.

Why do I sit in darkness

ignoring the calls?

I shift in my cave

dreaming of skunk,

the mud world,

ant people?

Deer peer into my eyes

and see what people

cannot see.

A howl in my throat,

casts out my ancestors

centuries silenced cries

housed in my body.

Dianna Vagianos Armentrout is a writer, teacher, workshop facilitator and poetry therapist. Her memoir Walking the Labyrinth of My Heart: A Journey of Pregnancy, Grief and Newborn Death was published to support others going through pregnancies with life-limiting diagnoses and grief. Dianna’s poems, memoir and short fiction are published in several journals and anthologies including The Vermont Literary Review, The Connecticut Review, Melusine or Women in the 21st century, Sacred Fire Magazine, and Inkwell. Dianna is currently finishing her novel about her female Greek ancestors, and is seeking a publisher for her first poetry collection. She blogs at www.diannavagianos.com.