Tomorrow is your birthday. You’d be
in your seventies
having won the Pulitzer Prize among countless
other awards.

Having ascended from the hollow hell you concocted,
you now write with expert metaphor and imagery,
loving the blue jays outside your kitchen window.

Your grandchildren visit you for tea,
a habit you absorbed from England
on those cold, snowy days
and still keep up now that you’re
back in Massachusetts, near your utopian ocean.

One granddaughter is 15, has long
jetty hair and shadowy sweatshirts and jeans.
She picks “Ariel” up off your shelf
but you gently take it out of her hands.
She protests, and you say,
“I will not help you sink. Do not read
this until you see the luminescence of life.”

Just as I will tell my 15 year old,
I have a book for when you are old enough
to understand why she haunted my thoughts at 15
why I hated what I perceived her to do to me at 19
and why I loved her again at 24.

How I discovered her life through her poetry
How I learned from her mistakes.

26, October 2006

10/26/2006

Posted on 10/26/2006
Copyright © 2024 Lisa Marie Brodsky