Two poems

Did you know that April is peotry month? Well, it is. I like poems more than I like a lot of things, well, good poems. I found the two below on various "poem of the day" blogs or websites. The first one reminded me of both Valerie and my mom. A non-mom speaking about the sacrifices a mom makes for her family is maybe one of the most disrespectful things you could do, I imagine. It seems like it would be the opitome of casting pearls before swine, so I won't try to do it. This poem though, I'm sure written by a mother, has a voice that is able to do this while preserving the secrecy of a mom's heart for her family.
The other, about dad's, did not speak to me quite as much as the first, but I still think it is wonderful.
For those of you who don't regularly read poetry, I think that can't be entirely appreciated unless you are used to reading poetry. Give them a chance. Read them a few times. Anyway, that was a long introduction to something that needs no introduction...

Yellow Bowl
by Rachel Contreni Flynn

If light pours like water
into the kitchen where I sway
with my tired children,

if the rug beneath us
is woven with tough flowers,
and the yellow bowl on the table

rests with the sweet heft
of fruit, the sun-warmed plums,
if my body curves over the babies,

and if I am singing,
then loneliness has lost its shape,
and this quiet is only quiet.



Men at Forty
by Donald Justice

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practises tying
His father's tie there in secret

And the face of the father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.