Finding Yourself in Someone Else's Poem

This morning I sat down with The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, and began reading the chapter on families.

I had no intentions of taking up the writing challenge.

Then I began reading a poem by Li-Young Lee, called "The Gift." One stanza in, I knew that a poem had found me, despite my refusal to engage.

So I put Li-Young's poem (and my curiosity) aside before finishing, and wrote this poem in response. The end of Li-Young's poem actually answered my question to him in my own poem, so I've included it as an afterward.


Li-Young Lee's Metal Splinter

Your father enters the poem
early,
storying past
the metal splinter
in your palm.

I set your paternity, and the poem,
aside,
to reach back
for my mother
and try to remember

what kind of day it was
when I played by
the barn where I have heard
that my own father
raised pigs
(I do not remember this).

And what kind of day it was
when I found the barn,
door open,
silent

and tried to pluck silver
lines from silver webs
long-left,
then tendered my hand
on noiseless silvered wood

until my palms
were rife
with the evidence
of my trying,

and mother
spent the night
with a silver tweezer,
counting as she went...
ninety-eight
ninety-nine
one hundred—

a ritual for my
tears. And now
I wonder,
Li-Young, did you cry,
and who was in the story,
and how many times
have you counted it since,
to forget, and to
remember.


Afterward, from Li-Young Lee's "The Gift"

And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
When he's given something to keep.
I kissed my father.

Post in honor of One Shot Wednesday.