Just recently, for some unknown and unprompted reason, a memory flashed from when I was eight or nine years old. I was visiting my grandmother in Shreveport for a summer week. I was sitting on the floor of her living room in the small frame house built by my grandfather and father. The front door opened, I looked up, and there stood what looked a younger version of my Aunt Rubye. I stared. She was equally taken aback; she was seeing the protective older brother she knew as a child.
The entrance of my grandmother from the kitchen broke the spell. She introduced us. It was my Aunt Ruth, barely if ever mentioned by my father. They hadn’t spoken in almost 25 years, and they wouldn’t for almost another 20, when she was diagnosed with an inoperable cancer.
My memory had been shaped and created by something that had happened some 15 years before that surprise meeting, and it would open into an extended story of how a brother and sister had fallen out. I would come to understand that every memory was its own story, and it didn’t have to be a story I was personally part of until that front door opened.
What likely put me in mind of that memory was A Room Full of Ghosts: Poems of Remembering, the 2025 collection by Susan Rooke.
Some Tuesday Readings
Identifying happenings – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.
Poetry Prompt: Meet Your Muse Terpsichore – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry.
What Did You Do Last Week? – poem by Erin Murphy at Every Day Poems.
“Mr. Flood’s Party,” poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.
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