Saturday Might Be The Day

Will I write today? There is still hope, even though the furnace is broken in my house, even though it's raining in California in May, even though I'm cold, Jackson has a baseball game, and I must do the laundry, I might still write a poem.



In the meantime, there is fabulous poetry news in the world: After 341 Years, British Poet Laureate Is a Woman! Even though I don't know anything about Carol Ann Duffy's poems, I like several things about her already. She has three names, one of which is the same as an entire beloved branch of my family (Duffy) and she's got great book covers. Here's a glimpse.



"In Out of Fashion Carol Ann Duffy selects the best and most stylish contemporary poets and asks them in turn to select their favourite poem, from another time or culture, which looks at how we dress, or undress, how we cover up or reveal. In these vibrant poems, we are shown how clothes, fashion and jewellery are both a necessary and luxurious, a practical and sensual, a liberating or repressing part of our lives."

If she's really collecting poems about clothes, then she's my kind of woman/poet: one for Laundry Songs!

More about her at the Guardian, and the Academy of American Poets. Harder to find any of her poems published on line -- at least in the obvious first choices that Google coughs up. Here's one, called 'History' that I found at AAP. It's not very nice, but staggeringly powerful and beautiful. As usual, Blogger has mangled the formatting, so check out the AAP link to see it in its intended shape.

History

She woke up old at last, alone,
bones in a bed, not a tooth
in her head, half dead, shuffled
and limped downstairs
in the rag of her nightdress,
smelling of pee.

Slurped tea, stared
at her hand--twigs, stained gloves--
wheezed and coughed, pulled on
the coat that hung from a hook
on the door, lay on the sofa,
dozed, snored.

She was History.
She'd seen them ease him down
from the Cross, his mother gasping
for breath, as though his death
was a difficult birth, the soldiers spitting,
spears in the earth;

been there
when the fisherman swore he was back
from the dead; seen the basilicas rise
in Jerusalem, Constantinople, Sicily; watched
for a hundred years as the air of Rome
turned into stone;

witnessed the wars,
the bloody crusades, knew them by date
and by name, Bannockburn, Passchendaele,
Babi Yar, Vietnam. She'd heard the last words
of the martyrs burnt at the stake, the murderers
hung by the neck,

seen up-close
how the saint whistled and spat in the flames,
how the dictator strutting and stuttering film
blew out his brains, how the children waved
their little hands from the trains. She woke again,
cold, in the dark,

in the empty house.
Bricks through the window now, thieves
in the night. When they rang on her bell
there was nobody there; fresh graffiti sprayed
on her door, shit wrapped in a newspaper posted
onto the floor.