April is National Poetry Month. I have been receiving a poem a day with Garrison Keillor's A Writer's Almanac for years, plus this year I am receiving the Knopf Poem a Day. I have written about poetry over the years:
101 Famous Poems
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2013/09/one-hundred-and-one-famous-poems.html
Emily Dickinson
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2015/02/love-poems-by-emily-dickinson.html
Stephen Crane
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2014/03/roots-of-understanding-stephen-cranes.html
Robert Hillyer
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2015/04/roots-of-understanding-poetry-of-robert.html
Edgar Allen Poe
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2014/09/my-grandfathers-edgar-allen-poe.html
Rainer Maria Rilke
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-rilke-of-ruth-speirs-new-poems.html
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2014/04/roots-of-understanding-letters-to-young.html
Thomas Hardy
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2016/01/selected-poems-by-thomas-hardy.html
Anne Sexton
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-poetry-of-anne-sexton.html
Ezra Pound
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-early-poems-of-ezra-pound.html
And in 2015 the entirety of A Year With the Fairies by Anna O. Scott!
Today I want to share a poem I wrote, well, many years ago. It is based on one of my first memories.
*****
"In the beginning was the word"
Nancy
A. Bekofske
Recalled:
two
figures seated at a kitchen table
lost
in the glare of unfiltered sunlight.
Shadow
players, male and female,
each
with lighted cigarettes streaming blue smoke.
White
light, white walls, and shadows moving
and
talk about grown-up things while
I played, pushing
some wheeled toy across the floor
into my parent's dark bedroom,
into the nursery with its barred bed now forgotten,
down the narrow uncarpeted hallway,
into the slatted venetian-blind light of the living room
the radio standing on the floor playing
"Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White"
or was it "The Poor People of Paris," I've forgotten,
back into the kitchen
where
they sat, talking still, pushing papers about,
some
business, I suppose, when I heard a name,
a
word never before spoken for all I knew,
and
I longed to make its magnetic beauty mine:
I
stopped my play and mouthed that word
like
a sacred prayer recited in private,
savoring
it on the tongue, my ears
ringing
with pure response,
that
one word opening my mind to majestic possibilities.
"What did you say, hon?" Bending down, indulgent,
the man asked, and my mother, embarrassed
urged me to repeat myself, so they could understand.
I knew they would never understand
the magic of that moment, even at, say, three;
I could not utter that word, it would have been
a misuse, like swearing with the Deity's name.
They
returned to their conversation, dismissing me,
a
child, as having done a child-like thing
of
great amusement to the wisdom of age.
Only I knew the worth of the word,
a sound so potent it could stop adult speech
and demand their attention
to listen to
a child
who had just
learned
the power of a beautiful word.
