Vox Populi
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Sandy Solomon: Widow
An amputated leg, they say, tingles,
an ear long deaf still jangles the brain:
the body asserts the integrity of its parts,
and this body, at odd hours, yearns
as if his hand had passed my shoulder,
as if snores rose above the downturned book.
Now the mockingbird at the mulberry
and its mate on the fence pretend they’re crows
and their caws contend with the noise in my bones
as I stand at the window washing up:
one plate, one fork, one mended cup.
~~~
Sandy Solomon teaches at Vanderbilt University where she is Writer in Residence in Vanderbilt’s Creative Writing Program. Her book, Pears, Lake, Sun, which received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press, was published simultaneously in the UK by Peterloo Poets. Solomon has published poems in The New Yorker, Plume, Scientific American, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review and The Times Literary Supplement.
Copyright 2025 Sandy Solomon
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This sonnet-like poem sent a chill down my arms. Oh, how heartbreakingly beautiful this poem is, both in its craft and its sentiment! Thank you, Sandy.
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Wonderful concision. Visceral and vulnerable.
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Thanks, Fred. Sandy’s poems are small miracles.
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‘The body asserts the integrity of its parts’ – somehow this line captures so much of the lostness of our wholeness when a partner dies. And that last line requires a breath before speaking aloud.
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Perfectly said, Jan. Thank you!
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The musicality of the poem moves me deeply. It reads sonorously. The rhyming ending closes the work like a brave attempt to piece together meaning from brokenness.
As to content, Sandy Solomon speaks to my own history of grief. Even last night, 7 years onward in widowerhood, I woke in darkness, and listened again for a murmur or snore or sigh from Pam’s pillow, a sign to bring back the tingle.
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Thank you, Jim, for this heartfelt and perceptive response to the poem.
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I still remember how much I loved Pears, Lake, Sun when it first came out. And this poem–how it moves from the general to the particular to the even more particular so deftly and movingly–is truly wonderful, both in its restraint and the way that restraint delivers the last line’s knock-out emotional punch.
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Well-said, Bob. Sandy is the consummate craftswoman. Love her work.
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This one shivered its way into my marrow, as so few poems do. Thank you, Sandy Solomon.
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Thanks, Robert. “Shivered its way into my marrow, as so few poems do.” What profound thing to say about poetry!
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Such a perfect game of image and sound as if the poet’s heart was all catcher’s mitt and consummate skill. She’s there poised between the in- and the outfield letting nothing by.
Ah the blessed broken thing!
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Beautiful, Sean. Thank you.
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This seems deceptively simple but deeply profound. What a magnificent poem. Thank you Sandy. Even though I am not a widow this short poem “spoke” to me.
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