Sarah Dickenson Snyder

The Odyssey

It’s chock full of notations
like I was translating the translation,
like I was figuring out a mystery
like I wanted to find the line
when Penelope knows
that Odysseus has returned.

First the divine sign: Telemachus's sneeze.
She laughs at this disruption
of sound down in the main hall.
Knows a sneeze releases truth:
may death relieve us, clean as that,
of all the suitors. A woman who
has mourned for almost two decades
and four hundred pages of tears,
silences, weaving, unweaving,
waiting for Odysseus to exact revenge,
and then suddenly seized by laughter—

how I begin to see the shattering
as fallen pieces that might be collected
and held in my palm. That there is
warmth in the gathering.

The scent of spring rising from a long winter,
the bush of lilacs finding courage to return
in cones of fragrant purple flowers. I smell
something of my mother on the hairbrush
she left behind and touch
the wooden handle she touched.
Yesterday when I hugged
a student, now an adult,
she said, You smell the same,
and pulled herself back into me.

Sarah Dickenson Snyder lives in Vermont, carves in stone, & rides her bike. Travel opens her eyes. She has four poetry collections, The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), With a Polaroid Camera (2019), and Now These Three Remain (2023). Poems have been nominated for Best of Net and Pushcart Prizes. Recent work is in Rattle, Lily Poetry Review, and RHINO. sarahdickensonsnyder.com