RApunzel’s Daughter

Her small body
cast in a red swimsuit
is bent by the spine.
She is in the sandy
heart of the hopscotch,
writing a message
in the strange tongue
of the ancestors
that lie at the feet
of the Tower.

Great-grandmother
waits in a house
that smells like onions
and the drumbeat
of the dead.
The little girl sits
in a corner
of the checkered floor
to watch the hired
woman comb
great-grandmother’s
long tresses
that stretch
to a time infinite.

Her thoughts wander
back to that beach
and the water swirls
of sea foam, that are
great-grandmother’s locks,
and she lets them drag her
to the bottom
of oblivion,
where the bones
of shipwrecks
sleep the slumber
of centuries.

And the little girl
turned mermaid
wonders…

She wonders if
her message,
written on the skin
of sand,
with bones
of seashells,
will ever reach
her shores
when the white
lotus blossoms.

Paula M. Rodriguez is an educator in greater Los Angeles. She started her literary career in Spain, where she won first award on the prestigious literary prize Francisco Nieva, but focused thereafter on academic publications that deal with different aspects of the literary experience, from Shakespeare to Henry James. Her first poem published in the United States appeared in 2006 in The Blind Man’s Rainbow, under the title “Other Words for Absence.” Since then, she has earned prizes in the Urban Ocean poetry contest, she has published her work in four anthologies, her poems have been published by Scintilla Press, New Note, Humble Pie Literary Magazine, Mercury Retrograde and Bacopa Review and her novella “Angelus” has appeared in The Write Launch. More recently, her first book of haiku, The Joy of Seasons. A Treasure of Haiku has been published by Poet’s Choice.