Sarah Freligh

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 Sarah Freligh

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Sometimes people email me about Someday, a picture book I wrote for adults, with subject lines like “You made me cry in line at Target.” Once, a parent sent me a Youtube link to their child reading Someday aloud to them. A few pages in, the child, who couldn’t have been more than five or six, broke down in tears and wept the rest of the way through.

Watching, I started crying too. What an old soul child she was, able to look down the tunnel of years into a future where her parents would be gone, and she herself an old woman remembering them.

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.