Poetry Tuesday – Good Poems

Good Poems, selected and introduced by Garrison Keillor, is a lovely collection of lyrically poems from classic and modern poets. There is something here for everyone in the well-designed categories: O Lord, A Day, Music, Scenes, Lovers, Day’s Work, Sons and Daughters, Language, A Good Life, Beasts, Failure, Complaint, Trips, Snow, Yellow, Lives, Elders, The End, The Resurrection

Here is one of my favorites from the collection (the Sons and Daughters category):

I Stop Writing the Poem
Tess Gallagher

to hold the clothes. No matter who lives
or who dies, I’m still a woman.
I’ll always have plenty to do.
I bring the arms of his shirt
together. Nothing can stop
our tenderness. I’ll get back
to the poem. I’ll get back to being
a woman. But for now
there’s a shirt, a giant shirt
in my hands, and somewhere a small girl
standing next to her mother
watching to see how it’s done.

This poem is a study in contrasts. Living/dying, girl/mother, giant/small, arms/hands, etc. In fact, it embodies my contrasting feelings on domesticity: bitter and condemned/calm and proud. I particularly like the contrast between the “giant shirt” and the “small girl.” A woman/womanhood is a metaphor here for writing a poem, I think. Writing a poem is hard and often gets interrupted, but it’s something worth coming back to and teaching to the next generation. I’ll keep coming back to this poem.

Buy Good Poems at Amazon.com.

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Tagged as: Poetry