Friday, August 12, 2011

Poem of the Week: Don Share














At Home


Greetings to the red-eyed clouds

from this, the house that sits


on the mound and faces the corner

that marriage built, where wine


was drunk and semen flooded

the egg which lodged in the uterus


that built the daughter who greeted

the man and the woman here


in the mound at the corner in the house

that education built, and you


know from home-schooling

that the woman can be the teacher


and the man can be the tender child

and ditto the actual infant, depending


on her sex, dependent on love and

income; oh our dear dependent


is ruining the new chair in the house

that nested ambition built, along


with naked sense, and the beak

of god, the job of love, the hurt


of older homes, the hang

of it generally, the hands of pain,


the haze of Zoloft and the pudge

of Prozac, the twins of failed


marriages that manage to live on

in the ardor of our redone arbor


here in the house that books built,

that Yiddish and the Book of Common


Prayer built, that Presbyterian pride

built, that pogroms built, that blue


and white collars built, that Bildungs-

romans built, that the Biltmores built,


that mad dogs bayed at, that the baby

was born in that the cat bit and mouse


whispered within, over which, mortgaged,

the thunder caught its tongue and brought


great downpours upon while the coffee boiled,

while the paper, delivered late again, said:


We fight the terrorists abroad

so we don't have to fight them at home.



-Don Share


Used by permission.


Originally published in Squandermania

(Salt Publishing, 2007)


Don Share is Senior Editor of Poetry. His books include Squandermania; Union; and Seneca in English. Forthcoming are a new book of poems, Wishbone; a critical edition of Basil Bunting's poems; and Basil Bunting's Persia. His translations of Miguel Hernández, collected in I Have Lots of Heart, received the Times Literary Supplement Translation Prize and P.E.N./New England Discovery Award. With Christian Wiman, he has co-edited The Open Door: 100 Poems from 100 Years of Poetry.


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