And she phones him every evening: “Each evening I call home and my brother answers. The narrative of the poem is that Rita Dove is phoning her brother, and the brother seems to be the primary carer for their mother. In the last part of the poem, Rita Dove says, “I put myself back into a trance.” And then she continues to talk, about “weather, gossip, news.” She has to almost adjust her sense of presence to herself, before she can move from talking to the mother who is her mother, but who nonetheless seems to be present in a different time, and then modifying that to go back to talk to her brother. And this poem connects with powerful insight about the sadness, about the almost teasing way where a person’s voice sounds like themself and still is themself, but it is a changed self, and that people can be in different times at the same time, and that there is all kinds of ways of lament and sadness and adjustment that’s needed for that. And that could be a parent or a spouse or a partner or a neighbor or a friend it could be yourself. I thought of so many people that I know, who are living around and with someone whose memory is fading. “and keep talking: weather, gossip, news.” “in the only season of his life that mattered,īut who she’d always been to him, for him. “with all of Bebop yet to boogie through. Wasp-waisted in her home-sewn coral satin “Each evening I call home and my brother answers.Įach evening my rote patter, his unfailing cheer. Reading poems that speak about the experience of change and reading old mythologies where you hear an echo of yourself can give you an accompaniment to the change, to say, you’re not alone. And often, change can make you feel isolated.
POEMS ABOUT CHANGE FULL
Life is so full of changes, you know - friendships come or go, or relationships end, or someone dies, or someone becomes so ill or immobilized that the relationship needs to change. Pádraig Ó Tuama: My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama, and one of the reasons I love poetry and old mythologies is that they help me to navigate change.
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