{"id":1794,"date":"2008-10-10T13:45:00","date_gmt":"2008-10-10T13:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/?p=1794"},"modified":"2018-11-20T05:30:01","modified_gmt":"2018-11-20T05:30:01","slug":"poetry-friday-selfless-scourge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/?p=1794","title":{"rendered":"Poetry Friday: A Selfless Scourge"},"content":{"rendered":"


<\/a>Today I pulled out one of my college texts, a Heath Anthology of American Literature. (One semester for some reason we strayed from the Norton, and here almost three thousand pages of proof.) I found a poem by Theodore Roethke, 1909-1963, a strangely troubled man from Michigan who grew up amongst his father’s commercial greenhouses and is described as a heavy drinker who drank to seek oblivion, a rudely aggressive tennis player, and an “inveterate casual pawer of women.” He wrote beautifully of birth and death in growing things, and curiously and eloquently of old women. He won a Pulitzer, a Fulbright and twice the Guggenheim. There is no accounting for who we are and where we come from to what we can produce. A lesson, perhaps.<\/p>\n

from<\/i> Meditations of an Old Woman<\/b>
Elegy<\/i>
1958<\/p>\n

Her face like a rain-beaten stone on the day she rolled off
With the dark hearse, and enough flowers for an alderman,
And so she was, in her way. Aunt Tilly.<\/p>\n

Sighs, sighs, who says they have sequence?
Between the spirit and the flesh, — what war?
She never knew;
For she asked no quarter, and gave none,
Who sat with the dead when the relatives left,
Who fed and tended the infirm, the mad, the epileptic,
And, with a harsh rasp of a laugh at herself,
Faced up to the worst.<\/p>\n

I recall how she harried the children away all the late summer
From the one beautiful thing in her yard, the peachtree;
How she kept the wizened, the fallen, the misshapen for herself,
And picked and pickled the best, to be left on rickety doorsteps.<\/p>\n

And yet she died in agony,
Her tongue, at the last, thick, black as an ox’s.<\/p>\n

Terror of cops, bill collectors, betrayers of the poor, —
I see you in some celestial supermarket,
Moving serenely among the leeks and cabbages,
Probing the squash,
Bearing down, with two steady eyes,
On the quaking butcher.<\/p>\n

I wonder if everyone knows an Aunt Tilly; tart-tongued and not suffering fools, putting up with no nonsense, and getting things done. The Aunt Tilly’s and Miss Pross’ (from A Tale of Two Cities<\/I> of the world …rock.
Poetry Friday is at Picture Book of the Day<\/a>, Anastasia Suen’s blog.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today I pulled out one of my college texts, a Heath Anthology of American Literature. (One semester for some reason we strayed from the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[93,10],"class_list":["post-1794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-poetry-friday","tag-views"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1794"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5223,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1794\/revisions\/5223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}