20 Comments
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Dian Parker's avatar

Heartbreaking

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Elena Brower's avatar

a whole life in a handful of lines, felt on our cheeks no matter where we are.

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Michael Mohr's avatar

Yes 🙌

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Jules's avatar

The ability to convey so much with so few words can inspire awe.

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Geoffrey Cadman's avatar

A memory jogger about negative capability: " “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

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Geoffrey Cadman's avatar

To read about a tragedy through a poem which this poem does beautifully helps me to summarise my own thoughts.

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Sean Openshaw's avatar

Wow. Such words.

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Shannon McCloud Johnson's avatar

Heartbreaking indeed..... Yet beautiful and touching. And it feels so true in my life.

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Jack Zaffos's avatar

This is powerful! Can see the locked closet, hear the thumping and the ripping of the artwork , and feel the slap on the face!

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Kimberly Richardson's avatar

•The Wild Braid

A Poet Reflects On A Century In The Garden•

A beautiful book I found many years ago. Stanley Kunitz with Genine Lentine.

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Jon Tate's Daily Practice's avatar

Wow…I feel that one. Good Lord.

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Michael Mohr's avatar

Right? Big time.

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man of aran's avatar

Wow. What do I hear thumping?

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Charles Laster's avatar

Earnest and painful to read!

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Michael Mohr's avatar

👍

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Oganga Mangiti's avatar

This is such a powerful piece! Do not even know where to begin!

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A.D.'s avatar

I think there's a secondary trauma involved when you're denied access to your own lineage. One tine of my family fork has an outrageous amount of mental illness and suicides. I think about how shitty it was, having all these people I share DNA with locked away in the "deepest cabinets" of our family history.

The big irony here, in the poem, is that the denial by the mother, the slap, is actually more violent and traumatic for the speaker-son than actually connecting in someway to his grandfather.

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Michael Mohr's avatar

Wow. Holy crap. That’s potent. I feel that burning cheek, too.

Michael Mohr

‘Sincere American Writing’

https://michaelmohr.substack.com/

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drewzmuze's avatar

🙏🏽✨️🕊

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