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from the issue of June 9, 2005
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American Life in Poetry
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
EDITOR'S NOTE - This is a column started by U.S. Poet Laureate and UNL professor Ted Kooser, and supported by the Poetry Foundation and the Library of Congress.
Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of poems have been written to express the grief of losing a parent. Many of the most telling of these attach the sense of loss to some object, some personal thing left behind, as in this elegy to her mother by Karma Larsen, communications associate at the Nebraska Statewide Arboretum:
MOONFLOWERS
Milly Sorensen,
Jan. 16, 1922 - Feb. 19, 2004
It was the moonflowers that surprised us.
Early summer we noticed the soft gray foliage.
She asked for seedpods every year but I never saw them in her garden.
Never knew what she did with them.
Exotic and tropical, not like her other flowers.
I expected her to throw them in the pasture maybe,
a gift to the coyotes. Huge, platterlike white flowers
shining in the night to soften their plaintive howling.
A sound I love; a reminder, even on the darkest night,
that manicured lawns don't surround me.
Midsummer they shot up, filled the small place by the back door,
sprawled over sidewalks, refused to be ignored.
Gaudy and awkward by day,
by night they were huge, soft, luminous.
Only this year, this year of her death
did they break free of their huge, prickly husks
and brighten the darkness she left.
Poem copyright by Karma Larsen, and reprinted by permission of the author. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at UNL. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
GO TO: ISSUE OF JUNE 9
ARTS HEADLINES FOR JUNE 9
Chiara Quartet selected as artists in residence
American Life in Poetry
Fountain Frolics series begins
Gude, Murphy exhibitions open at Great Plains Art Museum
Pulitzer winners to open Summer Writers' Conference
Quilt Exhibition Points To Early Political Activism By Women
Repertory Theatre readies for season
Ross to show post-Saddam feature film
732106S34705X
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