Three Poems by Valerie Lute: A Lovely Church, Thanksgiving Dinner, Lottery Ticket

A Lovely Crunch

We ice dance as the sun sets,
twirling under silver trees,
as prisms burst underfoot,
and two snowflake hearts sing out,
love, love, like the bells that ring.

Thanksgiving Dinner

A long oak table,
stretches for miles.
Cold air is chewed,
swallowed,
while gleaming forks
and knives slice
words short.

Lottery Ticket

My brother shows me a newspaper clipping
found in our thirty-five year old dictionary.
I’m puzzled by both sides until he directs me
to the one with a long list of dates and numbers.
I’ve seen this paper before, but never cared to notice
it’s the 1951-born draft lottery.
My brother points out May fifth, number three-hundred and one,
a number high enough to guarantee no service.
I think of my father, who was already pensive and withdrawn,
like his father who saw to much in another war, and for most of his life
kept a folder full of forms for government medals, never honored
nor thrown away, just locked up inside a filing cabinet,
locked up with every memory, every feeling.
The most my father ever saw of war fits on a slip of paper,
like the most he ever saw of love.

Copyright 2009, Valerie Lute. © This work is protected under the U.S. copyright laws. It may not be reproduced, reprinted, reused, or altered without the expressed written permission of the author.

Valerie Lute is an undergraduate student at Penn State University studying English. Her poetry has been published in the student publications Ivy Leaf Magazine and Hard Freight. In 2009 she won third place in the Edward J. Nichols Memorial Award in Prose Writing, a student award at Penn Statue University.