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ypoolceiling poem #2
what does fit the y pool ceiling is
miss clavel
she’s that big center disk
the small disks her twelve little
girls
who certainly are in two straight lines
I read madeline to my five year
old
granddaughter about a dozen times
one weekend a few days later
she had
a stomach ache told her parents
it was an appendix they
eventually
took her to the emergency room
the next day it was
removed
this is life following literature
© Jacqueline Jackson 2007
I’ve talked often in this column about how
poetry can hold a mirror up to life, and I’m especially
fond of poems that hold those mirrors up to our most ordinary activities,
showing them at their best and brightest. Here Ruth Moose hangs out some
laundry and, in an instant, an everyday chore that might have seemed to us
to be quite plain is fresh and lovely.
Laundry
All our life so much laundry; each day’s doing or not comes clean, flows off and away to blend with other sins of this world. Each day begins in new skin, blessed by the elements charged to take us out again to do or undo what’s been assigned. From socks to shirts the selves we shed lift off the line as if they own a life apart from the one we offer. There is joy in clean laundry. All is forgiven in water, sun and air. We offer our day’s deeds to the blue-eyed sky, with soap and prayer, our arms up, then lowered in supplication.
Reprinted from Making the
Bed (Main Street Rag Press, 2004) by permission
of the author. Copyright © 1995 by Ruth Moose, whose latest book of
poetry, The Sleepwalker (Main Street Rag) is due out in 2007. This weekly column is
supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the
Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column
does not accept unsolicited poetry.
Ted Kooser served as the U.S. Poet Laureate from
2004-2006. For more information, go to www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.
This article appears in Apr 19-25, 2007.
