The moon is full. I see it from my new bed in what used to be the study, high in the sky. It’s just released “the night-entangled trees.” We are home, working through the first complicated weeks after Tom’s foot surgery, getting ready for Hannah’s wedding. I just came on this set of reflections written toward the end of a long sea journey in 2015.
Things we look forward to about getting home
The sound of rain on the roof.
Hugging Hester and everybody.
A lady on the elevator said,
“And to think I’ll be making my own bed next week!”
Doing some things in a new way..
It would be healthy to
write five times a week, to
paint five times a week as we have done.
have help making beds, buying gas, groceries,
cleaning Whistler’s cage,
pruning shrubs,
putting the garden to bed,
bringing in plants that will die in the winter.
I’ve had a lovely birthday song
from our friends and servers:
the Indonesian version.
Nancy and Kirk, friends we’ve made who
sit at the table for two next to us,
have shared my cake,
deftly cut by Andi.
I understand Tom’s feel of being
cut out by not hearing.
It’s not hard to relay talk, table to table,
and he appreciates it.
Daniel and Carol have come by,
other friends we’ve made
sharing teaching, SE Asia and more,
and understood our pleasure.
I urge Tom to tune out the prattle,
boring endless talk from other tables.
We have our liqueur here,
but I’m not sure he can tune out enough
to relieve that strained look on his face.
There are times I think I seem ridiculous to him.
He says not.
What he most wants
is to get to bed.
* * *
All kinds of ways you maintain your sense of proportion. We get an emailing from the families of Bailey Meora and Sidney Shumacher who were killed in the earthquake in Nepal. There is nothing that will let us forget those young women or that event. The email thanks us for our contributions. It is all part of us. Even in this suspended segment of our lives, they are with us and so is Finn, our nephew who was their friend and for whom this loss will be part of his life forever.
This poem came from the Poetry Foundation. I discuss it with another friend who is writing lots of rhymed poetry and is trying to figure out why so many people he respects urge him to quit trying so hard to rhyme! I read this first not even realizing it not only was rhymed but was a sonnet.
Armed Services Editions
By Jehanne Dubrow
My copy of The Fireside Book of Verse
is as the seller promised—the stapled spine,
the paper aged to Army tan—no worse
for wear, given the cost of its design,
six cents to make and printed on a press
once used for magazines and pulp. This book
was never meant to last a war much less
three quarters of a century.
I look
for evidence of all the men who scanned
these lines, crouched down in holes or lying in
their racks. I read the poems secondhand.
Someone has creased the page. Did he begin
then stop to sleep? to clean his gun perhaps?
to listen to the bugler playing taps?
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