"Fall Foliage" started with an image of my granddaughter running and jumping on fall leaves in an antique cemetery near their home. It evolved as I thought about the continuation of life and what a true blessing that continuation is. I tried to fit in how one's perspective changes as we age. For example, I did not understand how inevitable physical aging is because, of course, that aging happened to other people until - oops - it started happening to me. So I was writing about the approach of death while trying not to be too explicit about it.

"Ball Change" is about my mother and the complicated relationship I had with her. She joined the Ziegfeld Follies at 16 without having finished high school. Since few people today know what the Ziegfeld Follies was, I mentioned the Rockettes thinking that more readers would know of them. She

married my father who had graduated from law school and she was suddenly in a different cultural world. She wanted to fit into this new world so she became something of an authority on grammar and deportment. She did not want to be dismissed as an uneducated hoofer. She never spoke of this but as I aged, I began to understand and have sympathy for her. I became the dancer in this poem, trying to use dance steps (ball change is a specific dance step in tap) to fly away from impossible expectations. What I am always striving for in my poems is image and heart. 

Susan Eyre Coppock is a retired French teacher. She published Cardinal Days: A Coming-of-Age Memoir in 2016. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Nixes Mate, Common Ground Review, museum of americana, Paterson Literary Review, Free State Review, and elsewhere.