Blessing Name
poem by Judith Swann
All this year we sat after dinner, afghans across
our knees, caught up in our gyres, as if we wore leg bands embossed with our calamity names: the ones whose child died, the diabetic, the college drop-out, the underemployed, the widow. Then in an old, cloth-bound library book we found -- in a black and white plate -- a raft of turkeys, trapped under what they call a rocket net. To calm them the trappers covered the net with pillow cases and Thursday, in a surfeit of pie: pecan and apple, pumpkin and squash, we yanked our tensioners and found ourselves retagged with our blessing names: the ones who just won a Fulbright, the dauntless editor, the young woman plying a trade, the retiree, the epicure. |
About the writer