Glenna Luschei’s voice is a brilliant gift! She sings the richness of days, the glorious eloquence of reckonings, hard places never ignored – full of grace and love, wondrous revelation, and all we must let go. Walk into the perfectly lit room of these poems and know you’re home.

— Naomi Shihab Nye

Decoration Day

By Glenna Luschei

I too am singing
and dying. No
difference.

As a child, the place I most felt at home:
my grandparent’s farm unfolded from the prairie.

Mornings, I drank coffee with them,
cream from the cow.

Decoration Day I picked peony and iris,
sold them to families
traveling to the cemetery.
Fifty cents a bunch or free to people
with no cash.

It was the Depression.
    Depression babies
    Depression glass
    Fathers walked all night for work.
I remember fragrance, lilac most of all.