I received the gift of Tova Hinda Siegel’s Uncertain Resident in the mail during this year’s PoetrySuperHighway Great Poetry Exchange, and Siegel has graciously agreed to let me feature some of her work on my blog during National Poetry Month.
As for her poem “Dishes of Life,” all I can say is that the humor and poignancy blend perfectly, and I totally feel seen.
Dishes of Life
The kitchen is now clean. I gird myself for the inevitable battle that I do constantly with my husband and my children. How many times have I explained the importance – no – the virtue of placing the bowls in the back left of the dishwasher first? Then and only then, any overflow will go into the front left. Unless of course the surplus of plates has to go there when the front right side is filled. Plates must be lined up, one per slot, barely needing a rinse because of my foresight in buying a dishwasher which rinses first. But it may still have the odor of old food, so I insist on the door closed. The glasses must be placed between the pegs, not on them. Again, efficiency in mind and use of space maximized. I’ve repeated this important lesson so many times but it goes unheeded. The deep bowls are perfectly suited for the back right where the slots are much wider. They do not go on the top shelf which is where not only glasses go but also anything plastic because you know the plastic will melt if placed on the bottom near the heating coil.
But you don’t know And I’m always moving the stuff around because you’ve all refused to take that extra minute to keep it organized and moving smoothly. So I do. And then I feel accomplished as if I have just completed a vital task which will keep me and my family in shape for at least another day, maybe two because there’s never enough dishes to run the dishwasher every day. But they never learn the lesson no matter how often I teach it. And the dishes lay at odds with each other in total disarray, disharmony and disgust and I am the only one who cares about the order of life.
***
Tova Hinda Siegel, a writer/poet, is a midwife, cellist, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother of many children living around the world. After earning a BA from Antioch and an MS from USC, she began writing and has studied with Jack Grapes, Tresha Faye Haefner, and Taffy Brodesser-Akner, among others. Her work has appeared in Salon.com, I’ll Take Wednesdays, On The Bus, MacQueens’s Quinterly, Gyroscope Review, PoetrySuperHighway, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Better than Starbucks, and several anthologies. Her first collection, Uncertain Resident, was published recently. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband.
Many of you who know me well are aware that I always have a bunch of projects going on. One of the things I’ve been working on lately — one quite near and dear to my heart — is a very special undertaking my cousin Meredith asked me to do with her. She’s calling it Charlie’s Angels.
Not the kind with Bosley. I’ll explain. (TW: death)
As a writer, I find myself revisiting certain events in my life through my creative work. These include growing up in my family’s legendary grocery store, laboring with my classmates in tenth grade to free a trapped deer from a barbed wire fence on the side of a highway, the unexpected death of my cousin Chuck when we were in middle school.
This was Chuck’s last school picture, taken in 6th grade, less than two months before he died.
These events that had such a profound effect on me during my formative years keep coming back, in various ways, in my writing, as I continually try to parse out their meaning and effect on my life.
You’ll see from the following post by Meredith, Chuck’s younger sister, that his death was quick and shocking. Meredith was nine, I was thirteen, and Chuck was twelve when he suddenly passed away from what my mother had called “acute adult leukemia.” Meredith and Chuck were my primary social circle at that time in my life, and my ensuing grief was transformative: I retreated; I quit playing the piano; I cried myself to sleep every night for six weeks. The adults around me, also spiraling in their shock and sorrow, had no way to help me, and so I kept my sadness as far inside me as I could. But later, when I had children of my own, I found that the normal fears involved in parenting had become compounded with my buried grief, so that every unusual headache and every unexplained bump or bruise had me calling our pediatrician for reassurance.
My cousin’s faith sustains her. I admire this kind of strength, but I have found in my own life that action is the surest way to dispel my own anxiety. Meredith has brought our shared trauma back to me in a way that allows me to act, and so I have joined her campaign to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society this spring. (There are more details in her post; I hope you will give it a quick read.)
This October it will have been thirty-five years since Chuck died. This spring’s campaign feels like a powerful way to acknowledge the raw sadness we’ve all carried around with us for so long.
My own personal goal is to raise $5,000 over ten weeks (starting today), so that other families will avoid the loss and pain that ours has known, so that other critically ill children will benefit from the newest, life-saving treatments being developed even now to fight these horrible cancers. No donation is too small or too large, so if you are able to contribute and feel motivated to do so, please follow that impulse, because action dispels anxiety.
If you feel encouraged to contribute to our campaign, you can do so by clicking here to visit my personal fundraising page. On that page you can also see an absosmurfly ADORABLE picture of us when we were little kids.
The campaign launches today, and any team (such as Charlie’s Angels) that raises the most money by 5:00 p.m. today gets an additional $2,500.00 to add to their total from a dedicated fund meant to bolster our efforts.
Without further ado, here’s Meredith’s post, which also contains exciting information about advances being made even now in the field of cancer eradication. Thank you for reading it, and thank you for reading about my own part in this story.
***
from Meredith:
My family and our entire community were changed forever on Saturday, October 31, 1987. That was the day my 12-year-old brother, Charles Joseph Jamail (better known to friends and family as Chuck), was called home by our Lord.
It all started just a few days earlier. Chuck was complaining of headaches after having played soccer. They continued with no relief, so Mom took him to the doctor. They ran some bloodwork, and after getting the results, my mom was told he needed to go to the hospital immediately. He was admitted to Texas Children’s Hospital on Thursday, diagnosed with Acute Monocytic Leukemia, coma-induced on Friday, and brain dead on Saturday.
I was just nine years old when Dad delivered the news. I had just arrived home from being at the museum’s Halloween carnival with a friend. There was an overwhelming number of people scurrying around my house, inside and out. Having been at the hospital just the day before and seeing Chuck in the ICU, my heart leapt for joy at the thought of him already being home! When my dad knelt down to greet me in the front yard and told me that Chuck had passed away, I only felt one thing…absolute disbelief. I can’t recall how long it took for me to realize this was our reality.
Since then, I periodically ask my parents to share with me their recollection of the details of that week, although, my questions for them have changed over the years. Recently, I asked my mom how in the world she was able to turn off the life support. Her response? The Holy Spirit. Wow! My mother, an absolute pillar of strength. As a mother, I have tried to imagine myself in the same situation. I can’t.
My own memories are spotty, the details fuzzy – after all, 35 years is a long time passed. The loss of my perfect brother, the one frequently mistaken for my twin, has shaped me maybe more than anything else in my life. My prayer, my hope has always been that no other mother, father, sibling, son, daughter, cousin, aunt, uncle, grandparent, or friend will have to experience what our community experienced. But what could I do to make an impact?
Chuck and Meredith together, probably in the late 1970s.
A wonderful opportunity finally presented itself: I have been nominated by a childhood friend to be a candidate for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) Man & Woman of the Year “MWOY” campaign. Seems to me like the perfect way to make an impact!! When asked to do this, I felt excited, but also overwhelmed and nervous. This is a huge task, and an even bigger honor!
Since 2000, 40% of all new cancer therapies approved by the U.S. FDA are blood cancer therapies. Breakthrough advances in blood cancer research are now helping patients with other diseases, including diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis, as well as non-blood cancers, including breast, pancreatic, brain, bone, liver, lung, kidney, ovarian, prostate, skin, stomach, melanoma, and lupus nephritis. You don’t have to look far to find someone you know who has been impacted.
With the mission and work of LLS, prayers are being answered. From the efforts of MWOY candidates who have come before me, LLS has been able to provide financial assistance for travel and medical costs for local patients, fund research, and provide general information, education, and support for patients and family members (including identifying clinical trials, support groups, etc.).
The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society is also reimagining pediatric blood cancer care with the LLS Children’s Initiative. LLS is striving to make children’s treatments safer, less toxic, and more effective—and ultimately, they will find better treatments and cures. While many children survive acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common type of pediatric blood cancer, the treatments are harsh and outdated. The long-term effects of current therapies can create severe life-threatening complications. And survival rates for children with other high-risk types of leukemia, such as acute myeloid leukemia, are very poor.
LLS Children’s Initiative is investing over $100 million over the next five years toward global, groundbreaking children’s blood cancer research and patient support. They are tackling pediatric blood cancers from every angle as they are the leader in a global pediatric master clinical trial and they continue to offer a wide range of free education, 1:1 support services, financial assistance, and advocacy on behalf of all young patients and their families.
LLS Children’s Initiative is investing over $100 million over the next five years toward global, groundbreaking children’s blood cancer research and patient support. They are tackling pediatric blood cancers from every angle as they are the leader in a global pediatric master clinical trial and they continue to offer a wide range of free education, 1:1 support services, financial assistance, and advocacy on behalf of all young patients and their families.
I am so excited about this opportunity to make, what I intend to be, a significant impact in the cancer community! I would love your partnership in doing so. My personal goal for our team, Charlie’s Angels, is to raise $500,000. Please know any amount you give could mean the gift of life, to a stranger or a friend.
Tonight I’m featuring another Mutabilis Press poet, Kat Gilbert. I love the way this poem focuses on the beauty in a situation whose subtext is laced with darkness, and in the way it celebrates a small and simple object for its tremendous importance. The poem pretends to be straightforward, but its depth cannot be concealed.
What Does Love Look Like?
My mom taught me
how to draw a heart for the first time
in the dirt outside the Max stop.
All the while, busy shoppers walked by, stalled
by our day’s homeschool lesson.
Her own heart was broken as she shepherded
my brother and me from errand to errand
on foot—a necessity even if it was raining
and her head was pounding
for the fourth day in a row—a dull roar
at this crossroad.
Still, she bent down to join
two curved lines in the middle with her forefinger,
over and over again so we could see
what love looks like.
***
Go to this month’s first Poem-A-Day to learn how to participate in a game as part of this year’s series. You can have just a little involvement or go all the way and write a cento. I hope you’ll join in!
***
Kat Gilbert is a student-teacher in the Portland Public School district. She teaches Language Arts and is studying at Portland State University. Kat grew up in NE Portland, OR and so the city and the many surrounding natural trails around it color her world. When she moved to the city from San Antonio, TX the city had changed a lot but thankfully some important places are the same. When she isn’t teaching, writing is her priority. She began writing poetry while studying in Ireland with Washington’s 2007 Poet Laureate, Samuel Green and Poetry Ireland/Friends Provident National Poetry Competition winner, Tony Curtis. She then received her B.A. in English from Seattle University.
A few months ago I was invited to become a member of the Board of Directors for Mutabilis Press, a publisher of poetry, and of course I jumped at the chance! I’ve long been an admirer of their anthologies and have had the pleasure of being published in some of them over the years. This year I’m including some of the Mutabilis Press poets in the Poem-A-Day series for National Poetry Month. Today is the first.
This poem by Dede Fox reminds me of the precarious balance I observe on the daily, as a parent of two teenagers (even saying that wracks my nerves) and as a high school teacher. I want so very much for my children, my own and the ones I teach. I want so much for the world to be an excellent place for them (even if it’s a wreck with, as the poet Maggie Smith suggests, good bones). I want so much for them to find their passions, and for those passions to contribute in beautiful ways to the world. I want so much for them to be unburdened enough to enjoy their youth but responsible enough to recognize it’s okay that youth doesn’t last forever, because good choices make for a much better other side of age.
I want so much.
Hide and Seek
She posts photos:
her dreadlocks through stages
in the dying process—
brown to blonde to purple,
lips stained dark blue,
emaciated torso in a black T-shirt,
feet in stiletto platforms
her favorite animals:
red-feathered chickens playing
follow-the-leader across hardscrabble soil,
turtles that she’s saved from 18-wheelers
crossing country highways,
dogs, cats, donkeys, fish, horses,
a bearded dragon with a human name,
all squatting at her dead grandmother’s
house with the girl and a boyfriend,
so young that he hides his age
behind a bushy beard and glasses
She sketches:
faceless teens with the words
“don’t let your light go out,”
or “I hope that one day you see me
for who I am
and not who you want me to be,”
but people who love her
at nineteen know her —
no GED, no job,
no driver’s license,
a frightened child
playing grown-up,
hiding out,
allowing her promise
to dim in the settling dust.
Only she can’t see
her unlimited talent,
wasted until she ignites it,
accepts responsibility
for lighting her own world.
***
Go to this month’s first Poem-A-Day to learn how to participate in a game as part of this year’s series. You can have just a little involvement or go all the way and write a cento. I hope you’ll join in!
***
Dede Fox is the 2017-2022 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Texas. For four years she mentored writers as the NEA/DOJ Artist-in-Residence at the Bryan Federal Prison Camp for Women and currently works with Houston’s Writers in the Schools at Texas Children’s Hospital. THE TREASURE IN THE TINY BLUE TIN, her first novel, was listed in 2010 BEST JEWISH BOOKS FOR CHILDREN AND TEENS. Dede’s poetry collections include CONFESSIONS OF A JEWISH TEXAN and POSTCARDS HOME. “Chapultepec Park,” winner of the Christina Sergeyevna Award at the Austin International Poetry Festival, served as catalyst for ON WINGS OF SILENCE, her novel-in-verse published in 2019.
I have to admit I’ve been distracted lately. My daughter’s birthday is this week; the Orange-Belt Fairy Princess Badass is turning fourteen. While it’s enough that organizing the festivities (as well as coordinating everything else going on in my life both personal and professional, and wow, there’s a lot of that) has taken up most of my attention, I can’t let go of the scratchy little tickle in the back of my brain that reminds me she’s becoming more and more a young adult every day, and not just because she can raid my closet now and look better in my clothes than I do.
I can’t put the brakes on this train and wouldn’t if I could. We all know adolescence is a time of Figuring Things Out, and that can be a messy process. And I wish there were things I could still protect her from. Not gonna lie, if I could go back in time and not give her a cell phone in middle school, I’d absolutely do it in a heartbeat. If I could pare down the internet to make it less about entertainment and politics and nonsense, I would. But some genies just won’t go back in their bottles. And even the stress of this morass has got me mixing metaphors, so I’ll just get to the poem and then get back to catching up everything else on my “ever-expanding, self-spawning to-do list.” (And thanks to David Jón Fuller for that gloriously apt phrase.)
This poem by Lynn Melnick always makes me think of my daughter. And my mother. And everything else about the water we swim in.
.
Twelve.
When I was your age I went to a banquet.
When I was your age I went to a barroom
.
and bought cigarettes with quarters
lifted from the laundry money. Last night
.
I did all your laundry. I don’t know why
I thought this love could be pure. It’s enough
.
that it’s infinite. I kiss your cheek when you sleep
and wonder if you feel it.
.
It’s the same cheek I’ve kissed from the beginning.
You don’t have to like me.
.
You just have to let me
keep your body yours. It’s mine.
.
When I was your age I went to a banquet
and a man in a tux pinched my cheeks.
.
When I was your age I went to a barroom
and a man in a band shirt pinched my ass.
.
There is so much I don’t know about you.
Last night I skipped a banquet
.
so I could stay home and do your laundry
and drink wine from my grandmother’s glass.
.
When I was your age boys traded quarters
for a claw at my carcass on a pleather bench
.
while I missed the first few seconds of a song
I’d hoped to record on my backseat boombox.
.
When I was your age I enjoyed a hook.
You think I know nothing of metamorphosis
.
but when I was your age I invented a key change.
You don’t have to know what I know.
.
***
Lynn Melnick is the author of the poetry collections Landscape with Sex and
photo credit: Timothy Donnelly
Violence (2017) and If I Should Say I Have Hope (2012), both with YesYes Books, and the co-editor of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015). Her poetry has appeared in APR, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and A Public Space, and her essays have appeared in LA Review of Books, ESPN, and the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture.
.
A former fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers and previously on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, she currently teaches poetry at Columbia University and the 92Y, and works with saferLIT. Born in Indianapolis, she grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives in Brooklyn.
My children are eleven and about-to-be-thirteen. Sometimes I wonder whether I will ever stop worrying about them. I’m confident the answer is likely no.
Sometimes at school events, I test this. I’ve been teaching at this school for eighteen years. They’ve been attending this school since they were four. They treat the campus — which, after all, is a comparatively safe one most of the time — like they have the run of it. This is not uncommon among faculty children who have grown up within its walls and gates.
But I still worry. Part of me wants to walk them to their building every morning and pick them up from it after school. (I don’t, though, not anymore.) And sometimes when we go to a game, I even let them run off and play — excuse me, “hang out” — with their friends on the other side of the fields, and I plant myself in the bleachers as if it were the only place I wanted to be.
On such occasions I like to tell my friends I’m snapping off a helicopter blade.
At the last reading I gave, several poets were presenting their work, and one of them, Jeannie Gambill, read this one. It resonated, to say the least.
I sometimes think I will start to relax when my kids are past the age of twenty-five. Jeannie assures me this will not be the case.
***
Directive to a grown daughter
When you ride your motorcycle
wear your helmet.
Not the half helmet.
Wear your full helmet
always.
When you go out on your motorcycle
take only streets
where
there are no cars
no trucks
no buses
no other moving vehicles.
Do not go out in the rain.
Never on the freeways.
When you decide instead
to go on your bicycle
be faithful to all of these
instructions. The routes
you’ve shown us you take to work
through neighborhoods
on your bicycle, there are
cars parked on these narrow
streets. Be careful. It’s hard
to see you.
Your motorcycle surely lost
from view when you are in traffic.
Do not go into the traffic.
Do not go anyplace where
there is danger. Stay
blocks away from any vehicle
in which the driver
is un-focused. Please say
you will do these things.
When you train on the highways
in the hills when you want
the challenge need the long
stretch the cumulative miles
when you bike into the hills
when you take your bicycle
round the curve slow
on the upward incline
and down down gaining speed
the curve go round the curve
go round and down the hill’s
curve not too fast.
When you line it out
the song of you
adhere please
to this
entreaty.
***
Jeannie Gambill’s poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, Cenizo, The Weight of Addition: An Anthology of Texas Poetry, Untameable City:Poems on the Nature of Houston, and the Texas Poetry Calendars of 2011 and 2012. She was recipient of the 2011 Dana Award for Poetry, and a winner in the Artlines Competition (2012). She has been a featured poet in Houston’s Public Poetry Reading Series and was a finalist in the Ruth G. Hardman/Nimrod Poetry Competition. She lives in Bellaire, Texas.
It was difficult to choose just a couple of poems to feature here from the book Shipbreaking by Robin Beth Schaer. (I posted one yesterday as well.)
This year, National Poetry Month begins and ends with weekends. At the beginning of April, I featured two poems by the multi-talented Paula Billups, poems which touched me deeply. Ending this month is a weekend of poems by another person whose poetry has impacted me in a profound way. (You can read more of how and why on yesterday’s post.)
The following poem, “Natural History,” broaches the grim subject of the Anthropocene Era we have found ourselves in, while framing the debate in the real root of its sadness: our descendants and the mess we seem to be leaving them. On a weekend when half of my little family marched for the climate, I keep desperately clinging to the hope of productive tasks and resistance willpower, using what influence and abilities I have to chip away at the problem and, ideally, lead others by example.
Like parenting, like teaching, I don’t always know if my leading by example actually makes an impact, but I continue to try to do it, because the alternative feels cowardly.
***
NATURAL HISTORY
To say love is why explorers trekked north
with oilskin and sextants believing mastodons
were still alive is fiction, but I would haul a sled
over tundra, hoping a herd survived, hoping you
will survive. My body opens like an umbrella
as you become an abstract of history, speeding
through evolution until you are covered
with arboreal fur. Before you have fingerprints,
or even hands, your ribs unfurl in fiddleheads.
They articulate in pairs. The world without us
is nameless. There are words for all the molten ages
before the seabed bloomed, but none for after us,
not even in Latin. Our imagination spurns
extinction, even when shown a dinosaur egg
or skies once darkened by pigeons. In the museum,
a diorama waits for the future, a camouflage
of blankness. I surrender to your small chance
of being, though you are only a faint shadow
in sonar, a muffled thrum. This love is talons
and wild valor against the baying of hounds.
Glass boxes bear sabertooth skulls, meteorites,
and tracks in volcanic ash. The revolutions
are numerous. A blue whale drifts from the ceiling,
navel wide as a dinner plate, a half-ton heart
on the floor underneath. It is doubtful hearts
will be larger in the future. I want to promise you
permanence, my constant orbit, but even continents
are revisions. I am only your diving bell in water
hemmed by shifting plates. For now, the only name
I give you is my own, though maps are drawn
for seas ten million years ahead. In Ethiopia,
a rift will open wide enough for water
to pour a new coastline and drown the valley
where the skeleton of a woman, not quite human
or ape, was found. As you take my bones
for your own, my greedy passenger, the certainty
of elements is all I have. Your inheritance
of calcium was starfish, then mountain,
then lettuce, and will be a third of what remains
when we are afterward and underwater again.
Bones will say stop before they snap. To reach
the heart, a surgeon cranks open the awning
of ribs until they gasp. My chest expands
without lathe or scalpel, only the force
of your arrival loosening the baleen corset.
To say I made you is inaccurate. You make
yourself from secret blueprints, a shapeling
clutching a manifest of your demands, the parts
salvaged from my body. The revolutions are sudden.
In-between marine, you command dark tides
and destroy me in your making. You wind
umbilical inside, as if to stay. I let the doctors
carve me open like cardboard. My body
could have been a grave. After nothing familiar,
all you know is survival, a green bank of yelping.
You practice a pantomime of instinct, crying
in my accent, grasping for branches with flung-out
arms, and rooting for my breast. Intricacies
of milk and sleep dismantle me. I empty
myself into you, hollowing by the ounce.
There are seven white rhinos when you are born.
A year later, six. I try to tally the animals
vanished in my lifetime and lose count. The frogs
in Costa Rica are gone, an ibex of the Pyrenees,
clouded leopards in Taiwan, the Caspian tiger
and Java tiger, a boa in Mauritius, and grizzly bears
last seen beside the headwaters of the Yaqui River.
Their names chant a grim litany for you to learn,
a half-formed loss. We are in a great dying.
You are going to die. No longer my throat
or temple, the most breakable part of my body
is on the outside now. A javelin anchors the air
between us. Fifty billion creatures have lived
among antlered legends and trampled mud,
but only one percent still ambles leeward.
Dream wary, I feign courage or madness.
There may be no refuge in greenwood,
but you are a stockade of light. I abide
in your clear voice in the grass. You have
only words for what you love: apple,
book, and home. You name the rest yourself:
cat a plaintive moan, spiders are wriggling
fingers, the sky is hands waved above.
But you have no word for me. The question
of who I am confounds you, as though asked
to name a reflection. Not mother or son: us. We are a coral reef, a pod of whales, descendants
of slime, an endless expanding. Under the city,
aquifer fills with seawater, slowly drawing
the avenues down. Someday, someone
will find our ribs in a midden of oyster shells,
ship hulls, and wooden doors. Instead of a cage,
may they lash our bones together as a raft.
Robin Beth Schaer is the author of the poetry collection Shipbreaking (Anhinga 2015). Her writing has appeared in Tin House, Paris Review, and Guernica, among others. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, Djerassi, Saltonstall, Vermont Studio Center, and VCCA. She has taught writing in New York, New Jersey, and Ohio, and she worked as a deckhand aboard the Tall Ship Bounty, a 180-foot ship lost in Hurricane Sandy. Her website is www.robinbethschaer.com.
Okay, I just sent my daughter off to camp on a school trip. It’s her first time away from home for an extended period without any family members. She’s excited! So am I.
But, oh.
When she first got on the bus, it looked like she didn’t have anyone to sit with, and she started to get sad, and suddenly every ounce of my childhood came back to me in one long sigh of pain. And then one of her friends started waving frantically at her from toward the back. She had cleared the seat next to her so my daughter could sit there!
My girl ran up and hugged me fast and then ran back and sat down and didn’t give me another look, all smiles and relief. So I went back to my classroom, wondering whether I should have stayed to watch the buses leave.
But no, it’s time for her to go on this trip and have her own fun time, and it’s time for me to have my normal work day. As I was walking to breakfast a little while later, she called me to say the buses had left, and she loved me, and would see me in four days.
Here’s my latest Twitter-story, encapsulated here (upon request).
***
The kids are supposed to be reading for half an hour in bed. Five minutes to go before lights out, and Tiny Beowulf comes downstairs with a very serious look on his face. Continue reading “Rocket Science at Bedtime”→
I didn’t post a poem yesterday because it was the Orange-Belt Fairy Princess Badass‘ birthday. (She’s now a yellow belt, by the way.) And since I’m a working mom who throws her kids birthday parties and even bakes them cakes (that often look as if they’ve been drawn by Dr Seuss), I was too busy on a weekday to post. I had every intention of doing so, but I also figured you’d live if I skipped a day.
This cake’s primary ingredient is love, and its three layers are held together with Type A overcompensation for being a mom who has two jobs, teaching and authoring. Okay, not actually. It’s really Cool Whip. My daughter wanted to decorate it herself, so she placed the candles.
When I was in fourth grade (as my daughter is now), I read this poem in my Literature class textbook, and for some reason it stuck with me — and has for all these years. But finding this poem, when all I could remember was a title and the first stanza and last two lines (because how could I forget them?), was a challenge. Hooray for the Internet and crowdsourcing information! I was able to track down the text of this poem here on someone’s blog. Et voilà.
***
.
Tuesday I Was Ten
.
Tuesday I was ten, and though
The fact delights me plenty,
It sort of startles me to know
I’m now a half of twenty.
It’s nice to own a bigger bike
With brakes along the wheels
And figure skates (the kind I like)
And shoes with little heels,
And have a real allowance, too,
To make me wise and thrifty;
But still, I can’t believe (can you?)
I’m now a fifth of fifty!
Although an age like ten appears
Quite young and un-adventure-y,
My gosh! In only ninety years
My age will be a century!
.
***
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Kaye Starbird lived from 1916-1993. I know nothing else about her except that she wrote this adorable poem. “Tuesday I Was Ten” was published in 1963 in Never Cross A Crocodile. Enjoy.
Tova Hinda Siegel, a writer/poet, is a midwife, cellist, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother of many children living around the world. After earning a BA from Antioch and an MS from USC, she began writing and has studied with Jack Grapes, Tresha Faye Haefner, and Taffy Brodesser-Akner, among others. Her work has appeared in Salon.com, I’ll Take Wednesdays, On The Bus, MacQueens’s Quinterly, Gyroscope Review, PoetrySuperHighway, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Better than Starbucks, and several anthologies. Her first collection, Uncertain Resident, was published recently. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband.
Sappho's Torque 