for Sadie Grace, gone too young

What to the three year-old
is the color yellow?
The lion-toothed rosette
she picked in the yard,

its dust trail across her cheek,
milky stem like her older
sister’s pencil. Swaying goldenrod,
the bees’ bulging saddlebags.

The warbler’s bright call,
song and body inching up
like the circle she colors
in every upper corner.

The banana curling in the bowl
to cup an apple. A paper tab
moved nightly in a book,
her father’s blanket-soft voice.

Newly named Professor Emerita of English at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michelle DeRose’s poetry won the Chancelor’s Prize in 2024 and the Faruq Z Bey Award in 2023 from the Poetry Society of Michigan. Her poetry has been published in dozens of venues, most recently The New Verse News, Sparks of Caliope, Peninsula Poets, The Midwest Quarterly, and Dunes Review, and is forthcoming in Months to Years and One Hundred Poems for Hearing Dogs (anthology).