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Only
Ellen Hirning Schmidt

You were the only one,

he told her.

Randy, blond, blue-eyed

crush of all the girls

in Mrs. Addis’ fifth grade,

playing spin the bottle

at Lynn McPhail’s birthday party,

dashing in his Boy Scout uniform.

Randy’s dad at the annual Firemen’s Carnival

selling chance tickets.

Randy’s dad called out one night,

Randy going along in the big red engine,

watching flames engulf the Jensens’ house,

watching his dad step on that live wire.

At the 50th high school reunion,

he told her.

You wrote a letter to me then

to say how sorry,

he said,

You were the only one.

—
After retiring from a crisis center, Ellen Hirning Schmidt designed Writing through the Rough Spots, a class enabling students to create clarity about life challenges. Her students, ages 14-85, come from across the US and 15 other countries. She teaches in Ithaca, NY; Cornell University; Star Island, NH; and online. She submitted her poems for publication for the first time at age 70. In less than four years, she has received the Helen Kay Chapbook Prize, a Pushcart nomination, and a Connecticut Poetry Society Prize. Her poems appear in Passager, The Avocet, Poetry Quarterly, Caesura, Connecticut River Review, Blood & Thunder, The Healing Muse, and Bluff & Vine.

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