LatinosUSA

he left us drowning
swimming in a raging sea
his love a needle

foil wrapped pills – unknown
origin – or a bottle
stolen from Breaktime

a year or two or more – no contact
then desperate calls
“send a ticket- bus or plane
it’s raining, cold
in California
miss seeing you at Christmas
I’m tired
in jail in Indiana
in Tennessee
in Missouri
bail me out
I got beat up
my car was stolen
I’m OK
send money
can’t wait to get back on the road”

he was a good playmate –
adulthood beyond his grasp –
he loved his daughter
made a cake for her eighth birthday
loved her but not enough to protect her
she found him on the floor
bloody from the face-first-fall
as he collapsed

did he know he was dying
somewhere between the high
& the falling
did he remember when he was young 
& strong & filled with potential
before he chose the drugs 
he thought set him free

Copyright © 2025 Sharon SingingMoon

This poem is from Sharon’s poetry collection, The Weight of One Hummingbird Feather(Spartan Press, 2023).

Blurbs

“Sharon SingingMoon’s new poetry collection, The Weight of One Hummingbird Feather, is a tragic memoir of the loss of her son to drug addiction in early January 2023. These raw and honest poems reveal not just her son’s descent into addiction but also his healthy years of promise. Imagine a mother’s pain witnessing her son’s hopes and potential disintegrate overtime because of amphetamine, methamphetamine, and fentanyl use, which finally claimed his life. Imagine the pain his 8-year-old daughter felt when she found the body of her beloved daddy. The poems are powerful, raw and emotional. One cannot read them without empathy and compassion. SingingMoon not only shares her grief but also wants readers to learn about street drugs, such as fentanyl, which are taking countless lives today. She was helpless, unable to change her son’s choices. Sharing the intimate details of the path his life took and her forever grief over the loss of her son takes courage. SingingMoon is a skilled poet, and I believe many parents will relate to these impactful poems.»

-Barbara Harris Leonhard, Three-Penny Memories: A Poetic Memoir.

«The best way to review Sharon SingingMoon’s book, The Weight of One Hummingbird Feather, is by using her own words. Addiction, she states, ‘calls the tunes,’ and leaves loved ones behind with the ‘maybes’ knowing full well that the deceased ‘was more/than the addiction that took him’. In the end, she concludes that ‘hope clings/to frozen branches’. Poignancy is learned experientially, sadly.»

-Nancy Jo Allen, Wrinkles in Time and in Love and Wild and Tame

    «The Weight of One Hummingbird Feather is a dare, an ache, a catalog of grief. As I read Sharon SingingMoon’s new collection, I felt a growing sorrow. The poems travel a parent’s hopes for her son, his decades of drug abuse, her own what-ifs, and his overdose death. With honesty and restraint, SingingMoon describes the difficulties yet never lets us forget her son’s personhood, sharing his childhood antics, his love for his daughter, the photos that ‘document the moments he tried’. As a parent and a poet, I’m astonished at the way SingingMoon balances emotional events and terse diction-an incredible feat that allows the rest of us to experience the intense dynamics and not pull away. ‘I save my tears for after you leave,’ she writes, words for her son and for us too, brief companions in one mother’s journey.»

-Lynne Jensen Lampe, Talk Smack to a Hurricane

“I haven’t been hit so hard by a series of poems in years. The first time I heard Sharon SingingMoon read from this collection I had tears in my eyes—for the experience they describe, for the poems themselves, and for Sharon’s willingness to stand up and testify and help others see they aren’t alone. What an important collection this is!”

Justin Hamm, author of Drinking Guinness With the Dead: Poems 2007-2021

Paperback, $13.00

Author Biography

Sharon’s work has been widely published in the US, the UK and Europe. And she often reads poems at local rallies, and has been a featured reader in many places across Mid Missouri. She is not just an accomplished poet, but she’s also a successful editor. She is co-editor of Well Versed 2024 and 2025 and Rough-Cut Elegies, An Anthology of Missouri Poets (Spartan Press). She is the founding editor of the Watermelon Seeds Anthology Project, a collection of poetry and prose to benefit the children of Palestine who have been wounded and traumatized by violence.

Sharon’s work has been nominated for Best of the Net 2025, a Pushcart Prize 2024 and 2025, and for an Eric Hoffer Book Award.  

Her latest collection, The Weight of One Hummingbird Feather, is tragic memoir of the loss of her son to a drug overdose in 2023.