A Gathering of Poetry: January 2024

It's the third Thursday of the month so I'd like to welcome you to A Gathering of Poetry. I came across this poem in the Washington Post Book Club Newsletter last week. The author's debut volume of poetry, A History of Half-Birds, was selected by Maggie Smith for the 2023 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry. I can't tell you exactly why I liked this poem so much, but there are quite a few of my grandmothers' characteristics included - collections of roosters in the kitchen, a keyboard that we played our melodies on, and tins of butter cookies. One grandmother's tin actually contained cookies and the other's was filled with sewing supplies. Both were wonderful.

Patients Regain Song Before Speech
by Caroline Harper New

So many lengths of catgut can be strung
from a body. Each body could contain hundreds
of orchestras, Mozart insists against my grandmother's skin.
I believe some part of her body still vibrates
beneath all its soft battles and sinews, and Mozart
understands. He is praised for the silence
between his notes. No one knows the reason
for his untimely death, if you can call death
a simple matter of bones, not the thick oil of memory left
on the fridge handle, the kitchen window
where she smashed the gnats. My grandmother
never learned to cook, but she filled her kitchen with hundreds
of roosters, perched in wait for the day she could break
their ceramic silence. Battalions arranged in the bellies
of unused appliances, or riding the spine
of the keyboard I never saw her play. She loved the button
that looped Eine kleine Nachtmusik through plastic speakers.
We loved to pound our own melodies over Mozart's
masterpiece, over her stories. I don't know who to blame
for the silence, so I sing. Can you hear me, Mema?
Mozart is the only one who understands.
Over take-out subs and tins of butter cookies, I hope
he is scribbling down your stories, and when his quill
strikes the words you are trying to speak,
I hope the rooster he plucked it from screams wildly.

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New, Caroline Harper. "Patients Regain Song Before Speech. A History of Half-Birds: Poems. Milkweed Editions, 2024. 

You can read more about the poet here. 

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