A whole marriage fails inside a comma

 Novelists work in vast, open vistas, whole prairies of pages. Poets work in their tiny Dutch gardens, where a lot has to happen in very little space. This need for compression can lead to wonderful moments, where jarringly different realities are forced to exist side by side, as here: the speaker’s daughter was “married / in a fairy-tale wedding, divorced…” A whole marriage fails inside a comma. Barely a heartbeat between the dream and the disaster. More than anything we want to protect our kids from the world. But…it’s the world. There’s nowhere else to live. George Bilgere

Here’s a poem for today, June 23, 2024

Everything We Don’t Want Them to Know

by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

At eleven, my granddaughter looks like my daughter

did, that slender body, that thin face, the grace

 

with which she moves. When she visits, she sits

with my daughter; they have hot chocolate together

 

and talk. The way my granddaughter moves her hands,

the concentration with which she does everything,

 

knocks me back to the time when I sat with my daughter

at this table and we talked and I watched the grace

 

with which she moved her hands, the delicate way

she lifted the heavy hair back behind her ear.

 

My daughter is grown now, married

in a fairy-tale wedding, divorced, something inside

 

her broken, healing slowly. I look at my granddaughter

and I want to save her, as I was not able

 

to save my daughter. Nothing is that simple,

all our plans, carefully made, thrown into a cracked

 

pile by the way love betrays us.

 

From What We Pass On: Collected Poems 1980–2009, Guernica Editions, 2010.

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