Judith H. Montgomery

If

Oh, if the candle made of wax and wick—
the wick that links flame and candle flesh—

could light my mother’s restless bed
and the tangled paths of her thought and sight—

If I could strike a red-tipped match against
the edges of my corrugated heart—

could marry the magic of wax and wick
to fire and bring the candle closer

to her wrinkled sheets, her ashy
wrinkled skin and her winding mind—

past the hoarded keeps of wrung tissues—
the wrappers of eucalyptus drops—

I would. I would. But my cardboard
heart is soaked with sweat and weeping.

I strike. Strike.

Judith H. Montgomery’s poems appear in Poet Lore, Gyroscope, and Tahoma Literary Review, among other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies. Her chapbook, Passion, received the 2000 Oregon Book Award for Poetry; Red Jess, a finalist for several national first book prizes, appeared in 2006; the chapbook Pulse & Constellation (finalist for Finishing Line Open Chapbook Competition) followed.  Her second full-length book, Litany for Wound and Bloom, appeared in August 2018; Mercy, which received the Wolf Ridge Press Narrative/Poetic Medicine Chapbook contest, appeared in 2019. More recently, her poem “Consider Salt” was awarded second place in Red Wheelbarrow’s Broadside competition, and her poem “Elegy for Hydrangeas” was a finalist in the Littoral Press Broadside Competition.