Tomorrow would have been my sister Rose's sixtieth birthday. She's been gone for three years now. Hard to believe. I think of her quite a bit, not always with sadness--she had a bright, bright spirit. When she's on my mind, it's hard not to smile.
Poetry allows you to transform difficult emotions and experiences into something beautiful. You could be writing about the September 11 attacks and create something that takes your breath away. Billy Collins did that with "The Names." Or you could be writing about your dying father and create a gorgeous exhortation for him to live--Dylan Thomas, "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night."
Sharon Olds writes a beautifully scary poem about nuclear holocaust . . .
by: Sharon Olds
I wonder now, only when it will happen,
when the young mother will hear the
noise like somebody's pressure cooker
down the block, going off. She'll go out in the yard,
holding her small daughter in her arms,
and there, above the end of the street, in the
air above the line of the trees,
she will see it rising, lifting up
over our horizon, the upper rim of the
gold ball, large as a giant
planet starting to lift up over ours.
She will stand there in the yard holding her daughter,
looking at it rise and glow and blossom and rise,
and the child will open her arms to it,
it will look so beautiful.
I find the end of this poem incredibly moving--that image of the mother holding the daughter as a mushroom cloud blooms on the horizon. It's right out of one of those disaster flicks from the 1980s. (You know the ones I'm talking about--a meteor wipes out the planet, a luxury cruise ship capsizes, California breaks off and slips into the ocean after an earthquake.) The tenderness of the moment in Olds' poem is heartbreaking.
I'm not going to get all maudlin about my sister in this post. She's simply been on my mind a lot recently. Yes, I'm still grieving for her, despite the time that's elapsed since her passing. I'm not sure it's possible to get over losing a loved one. For me, all it takes is drinking a can of Diet Coke, and my sister Rose is right there with me.
Tomorrow, I know the ghost of my sister will be following me all day. She loved celebrating her birthday. In fact, as soon as Christmas was over, Rose would start reminding us that her birthday was approaching. (She didn't have a really great concept of time.) Maybe I'll write something about ghosts--something to remind myself of Rose's smile or laugh. Something beautiful
Saint Marty wrote a not-so-scary poem about his father tonight, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:
Write a poem about your father or a father figure in your life. In the poem, mention the type of shoes he wore, what he ate for breakfast, and reference at least three fathers from television shows. Write to find out where these three images will lead you and what story your poem wants to tell.
Black Coffee and Burned Toast
by: Martin Achatz
He had black coffee and burned toast
every morning like Communion
while he listened to Marty Robbins on WJPD,
his leather work boots laced on his feet,
breast pocket stuffed with pens.
Each time he swallowed a slug
of black liquid, his Adam's apple
bobbed like a buoy in rough waters.
He wasn't Pa Ingalls wading
through chest-deep snowdrifts
to rescue me from a blizzard
or John Robinson in his metallic
jumpsuit aiming Jupiter II toward
Alpha Centauri to save me from aliens
with heads like inflated chimpanzees
or even Herman Munster driving me
in a hearse to get vanilla ice cream
on a hot July afternoon. No,
my old man wasn't anything
special in his jeans and khaki
shirts, just a guy you'd see
in line at McDonald's or pushing
a lawnmower on a Saturday
morning. He couldn't recite
Shakespearean soliloquies or perform
Calculus problems in his head.
One time, he sat in the front row
at a poetry reading, fell asleep
while I recited my poems. Later,
he told me he was just concentrating
on what I was saying, chewing
my words like Easter bread, Jesus'
face scorched into each bite and dripping
with tongues of melted butter.
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