Marzelle Robertson, a retired English teacher and school counselor, lives with her husband in East Texas. Her poems have appeared in Arts and Letters, Borderlands, The Comstock Review, Cyphers, The Evansville Review, First Things, and numerous other journals.
Pencil
Sometimes you hold me with such intensity
as if the words we share might slip away
before we arrive at their meaning. You work
so hard to fix them permanently, as if on a page
where you write and erase until we say exactly
what you would have us to say. Do you think
you have so much control? I remember trees,
the whispers among the leaves, our finest
lasting only a season, and those like the words
that we wish everyone would forget,
that were gathered, pressed, and preserved.