Susan Freiss

CONTACT
Email: freisssusan@gmail.com

BIO
Susan Freiss writes poetry to somehow clothe the sound of vibrant silence and to hear what she might discover. She is a mother, grandmother, gardener, teacher and community activist in Madison, Wisconsin, and has plucked up the courage to join the literary conversation she has long been quietly living and learning within by sharing her poetry at peace vigils, with everyday acquaintances and, now, by submitting her poems for publication. Her poem “Below and Beyond War” can be found on the Madison Vets for Peace website. She has also recently published in Amethyst Review and to A Catalog of Small Machines (Winter 2025).

Poetry

Time being

There is nothing in time. Everything is time.
—Zen Master Dogen

I sit on the hill where I spread your ashes
and where we rested, my dog between us,
on an ordinary Sunday, a long spring ago
I was a single mom, you were my new best friend.

It is this year’s first really warm day,
green blades and leaves pulsing, unfurling
below and within blond grass and brown forest litter.

I recollect cycles of snow and humidity,
my dog, a puppy named for Halley's Comet
by my children, our wedding, your eyes,
your pooling eyes when you stood beside me
as I put that same dog, in his old age, down, down.

It is the second spring without you, and I’ve learned
to love the sparkle of open water after months of ice,
the early wave of ducks moving through like a comet’s tail,
the pushback of sleet, snow, rain, and wild winds
as they wrangle rhythmically with the inevitable
warmth of longer days and higher sun.

As a time being, I recognize that energy and form
need the space of chronology—
cycles, openings, closings—for beauty
to unfold. We had time together.

I watch freshly hatched insects floating
in the heat of the sun, new yet so familiar,
the pulsing, unfurling in me as around me
on the hill, our ordinary spot
with you and without you, for the time being is now.

Originally published in A Catalog of Small Machines (Winter 2025)