1317: Living | Jason Shinder
"Living"
Jason Shinder
Just when it seemed my mother couldn’t bear
one more needle, one more insane orange pill,
my sister, in silence, stood at the end
of the bed and slowly rubbed her feet,
which were scratchy with hard, yellow skin,
and dirt cramped beneath the broken nails,
which changed nothing in time except
the way my mother was lost in it for a while
as if with a kind of relief that doesn’t relieve.
And then, with her eyes closed, my mother said
the one or two words the living have for gratefulness,
which is a kind of forgetting, with a sense
of what it means to be alive long enough
to love someone. Thank you, she said. As for me,
I didn’t care how her voice suddenly seemed low
and kind, or what failures and triumphs
of the body and spirit brought her to that point-
just that it sounded like hope, stupid hope.
On this day in...
2010: "Tigers" by Eliza Griswold
2009: "Otherwise" by Jane Kenyon
2008: Weekend, no poem
2007: "Solitude" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Perhaps I embrace the music of departure-song without lyrics,/so I can learn to love it, though I don't love it now./For at the end of the story, when sky and clouds and grass,/and even you my love of so many years,/have almost disappeared,/it will be all there is left to love.
Jason Shinder
Just when it seemed my mother couldn’t bear
one more needle, one more insane orange pill,
my sister, in silence, stood at the end
of the bed and slowly rubbed her feet,
which were scratchy with hard, yellow skin,
and dirt cramped beneath the broken nails,
which changed nothing in time except
the way my mother was lost in it for a while
as if with a kind of relief that doesn’t relieve.
And then, with her eyes closed, my mother said
the one or two words the living have for gratefulness,
which is a kind of forgetting, with a sense
of what it means to be alive long enough
to love someone. Thank you, she said. As for me,
I didn’t care how her voice suddenly seemed low
and kind, or what failures and triumphs
of the body and spirit brought her to that point-
just that it sounded like hope, stupid hope.
On this day in...
2010: "Tigers" by Eliza Griswold
2009: "Otherwise" by Jane Kenyon
2008: Weekend, no poem
2007: "Solitude" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Perhaps I embrace the music of departure-song without lyrics,/so I can learn to love it, though I don't love it now./For at the end of the story, when sky and clouds and grass,/and even you my love of so many years,/have almost disappeared,/it will be all there is left to love.