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Column 105

Laundry

Intro by Ted Kooser
04.04.2007

I’ve talked often in this col­umn about how poet­ry can hold a mir­ror up to life, and I’m espe­cial­ly fond of poems that hold those mir­rors up to our most ordi­nary activ­i­ties, show­ing them at their best and bright­est. Here Ruth Moose hangs out some laun­dry and, in an instant, an every­day chore that might have seemed to us to be quite plain is fresh and lovely. 

Laundry

All our life
so much laundry;
each day’s doing or not
comes clean,
flows off and away
to blend with other sins
of this world. Each day
begins in new skin,
blessed by the elements
charged to take us
out again to do or undo
what’s been assigned.
From socks to shirts
the selves we shed
lift off the line
as if they own
a life apart
from the one we offer.
There is joy in clean laundry.
All is forgiven in water, sun
and air. We offer our day’s deeds
to the blue-eyed sky, with soap and prayer,
our arms up, then lowered in supplication.

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Disclaimer

We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Reprinted from Making the Bed, Main Street Rag Press, 2004, by permission of the author. Copyright © 1995 by Ruth Moose, whose latest book of poetry,The Sleepwalker, Main Street Rag, due out in 2007. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.