Vox Populi
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Ira Sadoff: Emendation
I don’t have to go back To my childhood, there’s nothing there I still want; but of miracles Left to me, I’d like to restore a look I once wore and release it in the air. That year I found painting and hiking, I read all night long, struggling With my place in the universe. Climbing Rock by rock to the Knife Edge And taking in the aged panorama. I fell in love almost daily: everyone Was enthralling if you truly looked at them. Each had a mother, a few had lost Their fathers early. They too heard shouts In their houses. How dear they are, Even if amour’s hammered out of them. Those faces: rugged and turgid As they’ve become, if they’ve endured, A boy or girl inside still calls, Come back, come back and save us.
Copyright 2020 Ira Sadoff. From Country, Living by Ira Sadoff (Alice James Books, 2020).
Ira Sadoff was born in 1945 in Brooklyn, New York. He has taught at colleges and universities including the University of Virginia, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and the M.F.A. program at Warren Wilson College. He is currently the Arthur Jeremiah Roberts Professor of Literature at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. He is the author of nine volumes of poetry.
Vox Populi 
Ira your words are my thoughts. How I envy you for your ability to put on paper so beautifully. Thank you
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I love the seamless quality of Ira Sadof’s poems. They all seem to have been written in one breath, one deep, uninterrupted emotional impulse. And I “hear” them in my head as if those lines were speaking directly to me, as part of a larger conversation.
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He nailed it with this beautiful poem. So true and simple and profound.
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