Begin with a house. Perhaps it’s the house you grew up in. Or the house you remember best as a child. I can remember lying awake at night, looking at how the hall light made a triangular shadow on my bedroom door, and forever associating that shadow with the murmur of my parents’ voices in the kitchen. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but hearing the murmur was always reassuring.
Memories float through that house, some vivid and some vague. The house is its own presence, but it also serves as a kind of table of contents or a framework surrounding what we really remember from our childhoods. And that’s usually the people – parents, siblings, friends, neighbors, and relatives. It’s odd that some of my sharpest memories of my maternal grandmother and my aunts, uncles and cousins are associated with my own house and not theirs. Perhaps it’s because our house was the gathering place for family celebrations and holiday dinners, and my relatives always stood out more clearly in a different environment from their own.
In House of 49 Doors: Poems, Laurie Klein starts and ends with a house, too – the Fowler house.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.
Some Tuesday Readings
Happy National Poetry Month! – Tweetspeak Poetry.
Ekphrastic Challenge 2024, Day 1 and Day 2 – Paul Brookes at The Wombwell Rainbow.
“Easter Morning:” James Matthew Wilson reads the poem by Joseph Bottum – Poems Ancient and Modern.
The Miracle of ‘Ben-Hur,’ Hollywood’s Tastiest Christo-Zionist Epic – Thomas Doherty at Table Magazine.
At the Monument – Spitalfields Life.
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