poems about the past

Poem of the Week, by Sarah Freligh

Posted on by alisonmcghee

A few of the thousands of memories I conjure when I need them: my grandmother, telling me of course I was doing the right thing. A night in summer when RJ and Doc and I slept on quilts on the beach, the sound of the waves and the smell of the ocean. How my father’s hug would lift me off the ground.

The day long ago when my phone chirped and I opened it to a tiny video from a daughter far away: a mother and child sea lion, sunning on the rough shore of a Galapagos sea. The mother sea lion stretched and flopped over. Then the camera flipped around and a girl with wide eyes and a tumble of dark curls was smiling at me. Love you, Mom, she whispered, and then the screen went blank. I still see her smile, hear that whisper.

Wondrous, by Sarah Freligh

I’m driving home from school when the radio talk
turns to E.B. White, his birthday, and I exit
the here and now of the freeway at rush hour,

travel back into the past, where my mother is reading
to my sister and me the part about Charlotte laying her eggs
and dying, and though this is the fifth time Charlotte

has died, my mother is crying again, and we’re laughing
at her because we know nothing of loss and its sad math,
how every subtraction is exponential, how each grief

multiplies the one preceding it, how the author tried
seventeen times to record the words She died alone
without crying, seventeen takes and a short walk during

which he called himself ridiculous, a grown man crying
for a spider he’d spun out of the silk thread of invention —
wondrous how those words would come back and make

him cry, and, yes, wondrous to hear my mother’s voice
ten years after the day she died — the catch, the rasp,
the gathering up before she could say to us, I’m OK.

For more information on Sarah Freligh, please visit her website.

Poem of the Week, by Deborah Garrison

Posted on by alisonmcghee

A tiny, delightful girl named Alma lives across the street from me. She loves my huge, wild garden, especially the small ceramic fox who keeps guard over it. She likes to pick up the fox, hug it, lug it to a different patch of flowers, and set it back down. Alma just became a big sister, and I imagine her teaching her little brother how to say “Alison’s house” when he begins to talk.

This poem brought so much back to me, momentary flashes of memory swimming up. But it was little Alma I thought of when I looked out the window at the lamplit apartment where she was probably going to bed. A long time from now, when I’m no longer and she’s weeding her own garden, will the memory of the little fox she loved so much come swimming up?

The Past Is Still There, by Deborah Garrison

I’ve forgotten so much.
What it felt like back then,
what we said to each other.

But sometimes when I’m standing
at the kitchen counter after dinner
and I look out the window at the dark

thinking of nothing,
something swims up.
Tonight this:

your laughing into my mouth
as you were trying
to kiss me.

Today’s poem, The Past Is Still There is from The Second Child, by Deborah Garrison, published by Random House. 

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Poem of the Week, by Czeslaw Milosz

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Boston public garden ducklingsHere’s the fourth-floor walkup you called home. Here’s the tiny room overlooking Joy Street where Laurel used to roll her waitressing change into paper tubes for the rent. Here’s your room, with the big saggy bed left by a previous tenant. Here’s the bathroom where you didn’t pee at night because darkness was the domain of the cockroaches. Here’s the plant in the sunny window that you wound around itself because it was out of control.

Here’s the curbside rocking chair that your friend lugged up for you. Here’s the curbside rug on the living room floor where you used to host your Chinese dinner parties. Here’s the couch you were lying on that spring Thursday when the phone call came. This is the place you fled a few weeks later. The place where you were a girl and then not. The place that comes back to you in dreams, just the way this poem does. 

Encounter
    – Czeslaw Milosz

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

 
For more information on Czeslaw Milosz, please click here.