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Column 570

This Morning

Intro by Ted Kooser
02.21.2016

Here’s a poem of loss by Jo McDougall, from her col­lect­ed poems, In the Home of the Famous Dead, from The Uni­ver­si­ty of Arkansas Press. Like many deeply mov­ing poems, it does­n’t tell us every­thing; it tells us just enough. Ms. McDougall lives and writes in Lit­tle Rock.

This Morning

As I drove into town
the driver in front of me
runs a stop sign.
A pedestrian pulls down his cap.
A man comes out of his house
to sweep the steps.
Ordinariness
bright as raspberries.

I turn on the radio.
Somebody tells me
the day is sunny and warm.
A woman laughs

and my daughter steps out of the radio.
Grief spreads in my throat like strep.
I had forgotten, I was happy, I maybe
was humming "You Are My Lucky Star,"
a song I may have invented.
Sometimes a red geranium, a dog,
a stone
will carry me away.
But not for long.
Some memory or another of her
catches up with me and stands
like an old nun behind a desk,
ruler in hand.

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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. Poem copyright ©2015 by Jo McDougall, This Morning,” from In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems, (The University of Arkansas Press, 2015). Poem reprinted by permission of Jo McDougall and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.

Column 550

Column 569