Poem

Today I attended a luncheon downtown to support Personal PAC. This is a pro-choice organization that helps fund and maintain a pro-choice political presence in Illinois. I do not want this blog entry to become a political debate. I simply wanted to share with you the poem that actress/activist Alfre Woodard shared with us at the luncheon. After an intense speech regarding women's rights and the moral obligation to protect THOSE rights she ended with a poem that affected me on many levels. It made me think a lot about my mother Lynn and my Grand Bea who watches us both, and the women I may add to this world one day and the women I will never know but who will be linked to me...some through blood and some through stories.


The Writer
by Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash
And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,
And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.