Classic and Contemporary Poetry
MY MOTHER, 1930, by KAREN SWENSON Poet's Biography First Line: Don't worry, mom,' she wrote from tunis to fargo Last Line: Her secret refuge of remembrance. Subject(s): Marriage; Mothers & Daughters; Travel; Weddings; Husbands; Wives; Journeys; Trips | ||||||||
"Don't worry, Mom," she wrote from Tunis to Fargo in 1930, "the main street is twenty yards from me. I'm in full view." Down the hill's one side a chapel nested in a flutter of silver olive leaves, while down the other the town surrounded eggshells of mosque domes. Alone in her adventure's glory she sat, hummed Die Fledermaus in the sun. Yes, there was a man, Luigi, an Italian who called her "golden head," but he wasn't why she spent four months alone in the hotel that catered to a flotsam of French counts. It was to see at Ramadan the park before the Kasbah glow with "mellow moons" of lanterns under which men drifted in white robes, or to sneak in among Chanel suits waving gilt-edged invitations and admire the gold braid at the Bey's reception. Four months' parentheses of freedom, then the shadows of the prison house of marriage closed to the limits of the longitude of a husband, who preferred to sleep in his own sheets, the latitude of a daughter, who returned from Isfahan with slides of domes their tiles, blue as delphiniums, she couldn't see through pale webs of cataracts. She rarely spoke of those months I found among her letters, blithe with her humming voice warmed by the sun - still happy, twenty years beyond death, in her secret refuge of remembrance. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...RICHARD, WHAT'S THAT NOISE? by RICHARD HOWARD LOOKING FOR THE GULF MOTEL by RICHARD BLANCO RIVERS INTO SEAS by LYNDA HULL DESTINATIONS by JOSEPHINE JACOBSEN THE ONE WHO WAS DIFFERENT by RANDALL JARRELL THE CONFESSION OF ST. JIM-RALPH by DENIS JOHNSON SESTINA: TRAVEL NOTES by WELDON KEES TO H. B. (WITH A BOOK OF VERSE) by MAURICE BARING |
|