Classic and Contemporary Poetry
WUPATKI, by KAREN SWENSON Poet's Biography First Line: When a people abandon their town Last Line: And the small bones of a family. Subject(s): Abandonment; Legacies; Moving & Movers; Desertion | ||||||||
When a people abandon their town they take their names with them but leave their dead behind. Coming after, we exhume both site and dead but may only rename their rooms. Adults they buried outside their walls, children beneath the floors to be underfoot all day in talk between loom and metate. At night they lay down with the dead on the other side of the blanket of earth. All the rooms we have ever built finally hold no more than these bereft of all inhabitants but a purple quilting of wild aster and the small bones of a family. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...GOING AWAY ANY TIME SOON by JOHN ASHBERY SPEAKING OF LOSS by LUCILLE CLIFTON ROTHKO'S LAST MEDITATION by BOB HICOK HYBRIDS OF WAR: A MORALITY POEM: 2. CAMBODIA by KAREN SWENSON THE DESERTER['S MEDITATION] by JOHN PHILPOT CURRAN THAT MOMENT by EDWARD JAMES HUGHES |
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