Monday, October 3, 2011

Busy, busy writing



My Students are writing stories.

Richard Wilbur, poet the siblings
are learning this semester, writes about
his daughter writing. My daughter
is writing. He reads it HERE.
I might have
to read it
with my students.
Several
metaphors and imagery and
that last line~!!

THE WRITER

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.





3 comments:

podso said...

What a wonderful poem. And you know there is nothing to make one a good writer than to write!

Bonnie said...

Thank you my writing friend!
I will quote you.

Noteworthy said...

Degas dancer I saw more than once in St. Louis art gallery, and another place, maybe it was the Met, NYC, but I was wondering if there are more than one, or if the one travels.
Beautiful, and love the skirt.

Enjoying Jane Eyre as the second read, I think, but it's so much fun knowing what happens, and reading the details as penned by Bronte, not Hollywood!