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Poetically Yours - It's spring

Welcome to Poetically Yours. Poetically Yours showcases poems by northern Illinois poets, but sometimes we reach across state lines. This week features a poet from New Jersey, Theresa Rose Jertson.

Jertson is an artist, wife, mother and peer recovery specialist who took up poetry in 2020 as a way to cope with the newest normal.

She is working on her first solo poetry book entitled “The Chameleon Chronicles” with the publishing company Read or Green Books and is a contributor in the erotic anthology entitled "Touching Tongues" (2021).

You can find her reading her poetry on online.

Today she shares two poems “Ode to the Daisy” and “Little Bird.”

Ode to the Daisy

No other flower suffers at the hands of men like the lowly daisy.
Vexed humans systematically pluck off each of its pedals for sport.
And if that isn’t bad enough when we don’t get the answer hoped for, we find another helpless victim to sort.
As if they had a choice… do they feel pain? Would they scream if they had a voice?
To die for love… is a noble cause…. that’s what the Daisy does.

Little Bird

Little bird where are you going after you leave your first home?
Will you fly off to start great adventures or remain hidden refusing to room?
Will you meet your partner for life
or will you cower and I alone?
No!
Spreading your wings to rise to astonishing heights that is my prayer for you every night.
Little bird your mama knew when it was time for you to soar.
She gave you that push that you didn’t ask for.

  • Yvonne Boose is a current corps member for Report for America, an initiative of the GroundTruth Project. It's a national service program that places talented journalists in local newsrooms like WNIJ. You can learn more about Report for America at wnij.org.
Yvonne covers artistic, cultural, and spiritual expressions in the COVID-19 era. This could include how members of community cultural groups are finding creative and innovative ways to enrich their personal lives through these expressions individually and within the context of their larger communities. Boose is a recent graduate of the Illinois Media School and returns to journalism after a career in the corporate world.