Keeping a Cinder

Next project: making a National Poetry Month picture featuring Poetry Monster

I've been working on National Poetry Month stuff for my kids' high school. The school's morning news show sponsor said we could share a daily poem video, so I've been looking for short, not-depressing poem videos with good sound quality on YouTube. At this point, I think I may have assembled enough, but if you know of any, feel free to pass them along. Next year, I'm hoping to work with the Poetry Club (who will probably want to get the Drama Club involved) to get students to make videos.

We will also have oversized, laminated poems in the halls, so I've been finishing that up. I feel like I could use a few more funny poems, so if you have suggestions for those, let me know.

Sharing a poem today by Kathryn Stripling Byer that I read in Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia. I typed it in and checked it over carefully, which was a more intimate way to spend time with it than cutting and pasting. It made me want to start handwriting poems into a notebook, or maybe even doing calligraphy. I hope to share more from this anthology in future weeks. Thank you, Kathryn, for giving me permission to post your work!

Lineage
by Kathryn Stripling Byer

This red hair
I braid while she
sits by the cookstove
amazes her. Where
did she get hair the color
of wildfire, she wants to know,
pulling at strands of it
tangled in boar-bristles.
I say from Sister, God knows
where she is, and before
her my grandmother you
can't remember because
she was dead by the time
you were born, though you hear
her whenever I sing,
every song handed down
from those sleepless nights
she liked to sing through
till she had no time
left for lying awake
in the darkness and talking
to none save herself.
And yet, that night
I sat at her deathbed
expecting pure silence,
she talked until dawn
when at last her voice
failed her. She thumbed out
the candle between us
and lifted her hand
to her hair as if what
blazed a lifetime might still
burn her fingers. Yes,
I keep a cinder of it
in my locket I'll show you
as soon as I'm done telling
how she brought up from
the deep of her bedclothes
that hairbrush you're holding
and whispered, You
might as well take it."

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Mountain Time
by Kathryn Stripling Byer

News travels slowly up here
in the mountains, our narrow
roads twisting for days, maybe years,
till we get where we’re going,
if we ever do. Even if some lonesome message
should make it through Deep Gap
or the fastness of Thunderhead, we’re not obliged
to believe it’s true, are we? Consider
the famous poet, minding her post
at the Library of Congress, who
shrugged off the question of what we’d be
reading at century’s end: “By the year 2000
nobody will be reading poems.” Thus she
prophesied. End of that
interview! End of the world
as we know it. Yet, how can I fault
her despair, doing time as she was
in a crumbling Capital, sirens
and gunfire the nights long, the Pentagon’s
stockpile of weapons stacked higher
and higher? No wonder the books
stacked around her began to seem relics.
No wonder she dreamed her own bones
dug up years later, tagged in a museum somewhere
in the Midwest: American Poet – Extinct Species.

Read the rest here

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Robyn is hosting the Poetry Friday round-up at Life on the Deckle Edge. Thanks, Robyn!