☀ Today's Poem: "Margaret Corinne, Dunseith, North Dakota, 1932" Laura Read

Categorieën: Gedichten | Poëzie Leeftijd: 7 t/m 13 jaar 14 t/m 18 jaar 19 t/m 30 jaar 31 t/m 64 jaar 65 jaar en ouder

Laden...

6 maanden geleden

Html
Tekst

May 2, 2024

Margaret Corinne, Dunseith, North Dakota, 1932

We sit and wait, my sister-in-law says at the deathbed
and I do all day, I am dutiful, I remember the hot church
and the fat angels on the altar and the fan oscillating
by the woman who led us in singing, with one hand
always up in the air. No one knows I am thinking,
Die, die as everyone talks about Jesus and the better place
she is going. Last week my husband pointed at something
invisible and said, Here is the mind, and then he pointed
in the opposite direction and said, And here is you,
and I said, With the daisies, pointing to the same spot
in the air and loving myself hard for seeing a whole field
of them there. But I love myself less when evening comes
and his mother is still drawing her endless breaths up
through her ribs and I can't sit anymore, I am thinking
about the window and how I have to get outside.
I am neither Mary nor Martha. No small pitcher
of water to wash her feet, no sponge for her lips.
When we were alone, I told her things she already knew,
like we were in a play and the audience needed filling in
on what had already happened. She was a good mother.
In her bathroom cupboard, she had the oldest jar
of Vaseline I'd ever seen. A bottle of Emeraude,
green like Oz or something you could drink, the kind
of perfume you tilt and touch to your wrist.
I said, Don't worry, they've still drawn your eyebrows on,
and now I must tell you that all her life she shaved them
and penciled in thick, black lines, she put on a face
because when she was the girl in the photograph,
standing in the cold sunlight of Dunseith, North Dakota,
at the age of three, a stern brother on either side,
she learned she was nothing. And now she is whittled
down to bones and I can see the small flame
of her childhood not going out. I lift the covers
and she is wearing almost nothing and her skin
is so thin that even the sheet bruises it so we shape it
like a tent. As a girl I liked to pretend my sheets
were a meadow where the Velveteen Rabbit lived
and all the other animals I was making real
with my love and my fever, but I didn't think of how
they would have to be burned. This is what happens
with love, I tell her, as I picture the fire swallowing
her body piece by piece, the way sometimes people
eat paper to destroy evidence. I didn't know in death
the jaw sticks open, that the world would keep falling
into it, that we would continue talking to her as if
she could hear us, that my husband would ask
all of us to leave him alone with her for a minute
before they took her body so he could tell her
something secret, like when Joan of Arc
whispered something in the ear of the dauphin,
something we'll never know.

from the book BUT SHE IS ALSO JANE / University of Massachusetts Press

READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM

Forward

"Shakespeare and Fanfiction"
"Like fanfiction, Shakespeare's adaptation of familiar source materials 'takes us away from the notion of texts as static, isolated objects,' writes communications and media scholar Bronwen Thomas, 'and instead reminds us that storyworlds are generated and experienced within specific social and cultural environments that are subject to constant change.' Continuing engagement with and adaptation of source material can be a more effective way to teach and understand it, dismantling the myth of the 'author-god' and allowing marginalized perspectives to emerge."
via JSTOR

READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES

What Sparks Poetry:
Lindsay Turner on "Forms of Displeasure"
"In The Upstate, I was trying to connect the regional experience of a place, a certain corner of Southern Appalachia, with the bigger structural issues of America of 2016-2020, roughly, and of the world. I was trying to do this in poems because it’s also what I was trying to do in real life, struggling against the claustrophobia of depression and anxiety as well as of certain region-based patterns of writing and thinking."

READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE

donate

View in browser
You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com.
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.
© 2024 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030
Design by the Binding Agency

Deel deze op

Laden...

Andere nieuwsbrieven van Poems.com

Help poetry thrive where it's needed most Poems.com
4 uren geleden
☀ Today's Poem: "Sonorous" Chus Pato Poems.com
16 uren geleden
☀ Today's Poem: "Returning to the Village" Stephanie Niu Poems.com
Gisteren om 11:30

Meer nieuwsbrieven van Poems.com

Laden...

Gerelateerde nieuwsbrieven

Bekijk andere categorieën

Gedichten | Poëzie