Personal Effects

I have for some years subscribed to a daily edition of The Writer’s Almanac.   It is a quite wonderful birthday call on writers and poets.    It is a free subscription and I recommend it to you.

I am not big on poetry, but the following is my all time favourite.

Personal Effects

By Frannie Lindsay

For once not arguing,

we divide among ourselves

the things she left; her mother’s mothers’s

swan brooch, her pilled and odorless

brown coat, sturdy Timex,

the night shirt she mended

with clashing thread.

The morning before, I sat

by my mother’s bed

to ask her what she would like

the paper to say about her

life. It was like bring read a story 

backwards, the reader becoming 

the child afraid to fall asleep.

With the shift nurse helping 

and some baby oil, and trembling

the way he did the day he slipped it on,

my father bends over 

the quieted body I thought I saw breathe,

and slides off her wedding ring.