Poetry Friday: National Poetry Month, Day 10

Last Friday, I shared a poem about home by Maggie Smith. Her metaphor for home in that poem was "a book we write, then/ read again & again, each time dog-earing/ different pages."

My plan was to take that quote as my epigraph, and write my own poem about home. But instead of thinking of home as a book we write, I kept coming back to the idea of a book someone else wrote, a long time ago. Here's the poem I ended up with, about the experience of my friend Alexis Kreiner, who left Haiti on a special evacuation flight after the airport was already closed to regular flights. (Maybe you read Alexis' poem about lockdown yoga back in November.) I'm sharing this poem, complete with the personal details, with Alexis' permission.

Home

My friend travels home
to the United States
as pandemic rages.
She lands in an apartment
for her two-week quarantine
with a box of necessities
packed by her mom.

She tells me
she asked for
her copy of
Pride and Prejudice,
the ultimate comfort read
in a time of
germs
and culture shock
and fear

(plus taking antibiotics
for her hand wound,
where she got bitten
by her terrified cat
in the security line
at the airport).

I picture my friend
in her far-off isolation,
reading about the Bennets at Longbourn
and Mr. Bingley and his friends at Netherfield

and about Elizabeth visiting Pemberley
and finding a community
run wisely and benevolently,
and dozens of empty rooms
lined with family paintings.

So many homes to shelter in,
and all the problems in the book
will be solved peacefully,
amid dancing and cups of tea.

Darcy and Elizabeth
will get together in the end
after much discourse,
spoken and written,
all in complete sentences.

Turning pages
with well-scrubbed hands
in the quiet American neighborhood,
in what passes for home
at this moment,
my friend knows
everything will be
all right.

Ruth, thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

Today we'll gather with our friends - including Alexis - over Zoom to commemorate Good Friday. This was not our plan just a few weeks ago. We're finding comfort in what we believe to be true, in spite of everything else around us.

"My Song is Love Unknown," by Samuel Crossman

Today's line in the Progressive Poem is here, at Matt Forrest Essenwine's blog. (And he also has a tribute to Tomie de Paola, who died this week.)

1 Donna Smith at Mainely Write
2 Irene Latham at Live Your Poem
3 Jone MacCulloch, deowriter
4 Liz Steinglass
5 Buffy Silverman
6 Kay McGriff
7 Catherine Flynn at Reading to the Core
8 Tara Smith at Going to Walden
9 Carol Varsalona at Beyond Literacy Link
10 Matt Forrest Esenwine at Radio, Rhythm, and Rhyme
11 Janet Fagel, hosted at Reflections on the Teche
12 Linda Mitchell at A Word Edgewise
13 Kat Apel at Kat Whiskers
14 Margaret at Reflections on the Teche
15 Leigh Anne Eck at A Day in the Life
16 Linda Baie at Teacher Dance
17 Heidi Mordhorst at My Juicy Little Universe
18 Mary Lee Hahn at A Year of Reading
19 Tabatha at Opposite of Indifference
20 Rose Cappelli at Imagine the Possibilities
21 Janice Scully at Salt City Verse
22 Julieanne Harmatz at To Read, To Write, To Be
23 Ruth, thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com
24 Christie Wyman at Wondering and Wandering
25 Amy at The Poem Farm
26 Dani Burtsfield at Doing the Work That Matters
27 Robyn Hood Black at Life on the Deckle Edge
28
29 Fran Haley at lit bits and pieces
30 Michelle Kogan

Amy Ludwig VanDerwater has the roundup today at the Poem Farm.