Pam Baggett
Outside my mother's bedroom window
in the memory care unit, sparrows
and Carolina chickadees play hide-and-seek
in holly bushes lit with winter's red berries.
Across the lawn, the low brick building
of assisted living, a Coke machine against one wall,
shaded by the patio roof. When I ask my mother
what she sees, quick and sure, she says,
Stripes. Not on the birds or bushes, not shadows
cast across grass. Not on the drink machine,
surely not the rows of brick, too far away
for macular degeneration to allow her to see.
I follow her eyes to a set of vents on the HVAC unit
wedged between the hollies. Yes, stripes,
I say, wanting to praise her.

She knows colors and shapes but can't remember
worrying about electric bills in winter.
Doesn't recall how I had to replace the heater
at her old home after she'd moved in
with my sister. Stopping by the empty house,
I found it almost cold enough to freeze the pipes,
called a friend who sold us a unit at cost,
installed it on his day off for free. Because
he'd spent more holidays at our house in high school
than his own, because he loved my mother,

who can't make associations anymore,
from heaters to holidays and happy memories.
From Coke machines to the drugstore where she bought
cherry sodas my sisters and I sucked through straws
as we read Superman comics, Mom chatting
with Mrs. Sidberry who worked at the lunch counter.

These days, the Coke machine is just a red box,
the stripes simply stripes, the birds not sparrows
and chickadees but little round things hopping about,
no relation to the ones who do that thing they do
that some of us call flying.
from the journal THE MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
"Stripes" is an effort to express with love and without judgment what a day with my mother was like once she'd developed Alzheimer's disease. I enjoyed her company. We laughed. She felt safe with me and came to believe I was her sister Pauline, an aunt I adored. I accepted her for who she was and what she could do and remember. It was a very loving time for us, and I miss her.

Pam Baggett on "Stripes"
Ilya Kaminsky: "Poems in a Time of Crisis"

"Now I spend most of every day online, in America, trying to find ways out for Ukrainian poets and translators. Many literary organizations are willing to open their doors, bring in refugees, but unlike my grandmother and me, lots of Ukrainian writers don't want to leave. They want their freedoms. They want their own languages—Ukrainian and Russian—in their own streets. I understand. My Jewish family keeps running from Odessa—and then returning." 

via THE NEW YORK TIMES
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
Buying Books This Week?

Purchase your books, whether or not you discovered them on Poetry Daily, at our virtual bookstore on Bookshop. Every book you buy helps to bring the best contemporary poetry to you every morning.
What Sparks Poetry:
fahima ife (New Orleans) on Ecopoetry Now

"That I required a desert to write poetry of the swamp. I open another poetry collection, wander inside the wet density of word, step outside world as we know it. As if poets hold access to the mycelial inner-dimensionalities of Earth as we continue singing in its wake. Something about lack of old forest in the DeepSouth—as you say: the woods here are less than one-hundred years old, on a billions of years old planet, in a newly-contested country, written in the lineage of descent."
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
View in browser

You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com. 
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2022 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency