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Their Pleas

By Kelly Cherry Kelly Cherry

They pluck my sleeve, tug my hand, pull

my hair. They do not kneel to kiss my hem.

No, it’s not like that but they want tokens.

Again, not souvenirs but something small

and useful, something that will help them out

after life, maybe in an underworld.

They need a sighted guide to lead them to

the river, and they need a remnant of

the old world as they embark for the older world,

the one that has existed since the first

grievous death. They need to feel they still

can touch and still be touched, as once they did

and were, and one would have to be a cold,

uncaring woman to deny their pleas:

a woman with a bulletproof heart,

without a memory of life on earth.

Source: Poetry (January 2013).

Biography

Kelly Cherry was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and grew up in Ithaca, New York, and Chesterfield County, Virginia. She did graduate work in philosophy at the University of Virginia and earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Cherry was the daughter of violinists, and her early exposure to music has had a profound affect on her work, which ranges in genre from poetry to novels to short fiction to . . .

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