Grandmother Speaks of the Old Country.
Grandmother Speaks of the Old Country
That year there were many deaths in the village.
Germs flew like angels from one house to the next
and every family gave up its own. Mothers
died at their mending. Children fell at school.
Of three hundred twenty, there were eleven left.
Then, quietly, the sun set on a day when no one
died. And the angels whispered among themselves.
And that evening, as he sat on the stone steps,
your grandfather felt a small wind on his neck
when all the trees were still. And he would tell us
always, how he had felt that night, on the skin
of his own neck, the angels, passing.
Copyright 2004 by Lola Haskins. Reprinted from Desire Lines: New
and Selected Poems, BOA Editions, 2004, by permission of the author and
the publisher through American Life in Poetry, an initiative of Ted
Kooser, the 2004-2006 poet laureate poet laureate (lô`rēĭt), title conferred in Britain by the monarch on a poet whose duty it is to write commemorative odes and verse. It is an outgrowth of the medieval English custom of having versifiers and minstrels in the king's retinue, and of the later royal patronage of poets, such as Chaucer and Spenser. consultant in poetry to the Library
of Congress; the American Life in Poetry project is supported by The
Poetry Foundation, the Library of Congress Library of Congress, national library of the United States, Washington, D.C., est. 1800. Thomas Jefferson while Vice President was a prime mover in the creation of the library, and he supported it strongly during his presidency. In 1814, when much of the collection was destroyed by fire, Jefferson offered his own fine library to the Congress. This formed the basis of the collection until 1851, when fire destroyed some 35,000 volumes., and the Department of
English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
COPYRIGHT 2006 U.S. National Center for Infectious Diseases
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.
Copyright 2006, Gale Group. All rights reserved. Gale Group is a Thomson Corporation Company.
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