Susan Glass

I’m Susan Glass, a retired English teacher, but definitely not a retired poet. My husband John and I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and share our home with my playful, smart, and tender-hearted guide dog Omni. I love birds, horses, poetry, harp  music, and chocolate.

Letter To Martha

Martha, there was much I didn’t know in 1973:

Your apartment brimmed with Champs-Elysées sunlight, and women laughed raucously in a courtyard. You described their petite breasts, (idiosyncratically French) you said, and a French shoulder shrug, dismissive, (Fheu. Devil may care).

In the Louvre, you convinced a guard to let me touch a statue: 

(My friend is blind).

I didn’t know that was rare, or that only a few yards away and one century earlier, Louis Braille invented his writing code in the tubercular 

Institution des Jeunes Aveugles.

Martha, if rewound time could lift not just molecules, but buildings and faces, and us,

would your apartment even be here?

In 1918, we’d hold hands and run for bunkers,

trip passed fallen bricks, wait for bread with other threadbare people in threadbare lines,

eat carefully,

attend to codes baked into loaves.

We’d work switchboard night shifts, shout to be heard over gunfire, emerge at dawn to shattered glass, and

master by day, that devil may care shoulder shrug:

Fheu!

All I did not know

of friendship and history

so clear in old age.