Author's Note: As a child I took piano lessons, but they left me only with a life-long aversion to the piano. When I retired from full-time teaching, I decided to see if I could get over that aversion. My introduction to "Chopin for Beginners" in 2020 led me to reading a biography of Chopin (whose times were filled with war, pestilence, and discord, like our own), and from there -- inevitably, for me -- to writing a series of poems about the composer, pianos, and music.

Chopin's Ghost

"The joy of reading appears to be the reflection of the joy

of writing, as though the reader were the writer's ghost."

Bethany Reid's stories, essays, and poems have recently appeared in One Art, Poetry East, Quartet, Passengers, Adelaide, Kithe, Descant, Peregrine, and Catamaran. Her fourth full-length collection of poems, The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm, won the 2023 Sally Albiso Award from MoonPath Press. Reid, from Washington state, blogs about writing, reading, and life at http://www.bethanyareid.com.