Vox Populi
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Barbara Edelman: White-Throated Sparrow
The word that’s gone for example could be handkerchief and I’d think Desdemona or bandana the cloth square sailing without a name It could be Maamoul and the mind’s powdered sugar would find no place to settle I have lost my Maamoul and my Mamá and the accent on the second syllable the ear for cadence It hovers like a moth The word is moth The word is mother The mother hovers, still though she is dead Unstilled, she hovers in the heat Though she is dead she is buying me a car and this buying makes her happy happy in the part of my body where she’s stored like a scroll inside a cartridge In a car along a ridge windows open looking down on fields of alfalfa forests of hardwood I’ll be moving in her gift She’ll be still beneath the fields like the song to me inaudible that isn’t really gone for example the white-throated sparrow There’s a terror in the sound I cannot hear as it embroiders the air I am heir to a deafness to a hardness, to a car to a ridge above a farm a farmhouse synagogue a pewter tea set a coil of roots.
(c) Barbara Edelman. From All the Hanging Wrenches by Barbara Edelman (CMU Press, 2022).
Barbara Edelman is a writer and teacher living in Pittsburgh, PA. Her full-length poetry collections include All the Hanging Wrenches (2022) and Dream of the Gone-From City (2017), both from Carnegie Mellon University Press.
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There’s a terror
in the sound I cannot hear
as it embroiders the air — lovely!
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Yes, a beautiful elegy.
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Exquisite: the heart of the observer observed, with delicacy and art.
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Thanks, Richard! I love this poem for its warmth and quick turns.
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Beautiful and piercing poem. https://macaulaylibrary.org/asset/136579
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Yes it is. Thanks, Arlene.
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fine poem
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What a fine, sweet, lovely and very inspiring poem. We too have mothers “scrolled inside” us, a car to drive one of them never saw, not to mention an Art Studio, and swimming pool. Even a touch of cancer an inheritance. There is nothing we can or can’t do without in these terms as we sing with the little birds in terror.
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Thanks, Sean. I love this lyric as well.
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