What My Mother Kept

Chat GPT produced the image, according to my detailed prompt.

 

 

Mother's Day, and I miss my mother so much. 

She was born on a summer day in 1930, and died exactly eighty-one years later.

The poem below, "What You Kept" is one of the series "Four Songs of Parting" which appears in my collection, The Frangible Hour.

What You Kept

 

A mildewed trunk defending old receipts,

a cookie tin,

discolored carpets, pillowcases, sheets.

Easy enough, as are the Mason jars—

stuff for the trash or the recycling bin,

the church bazaars.

I toss aside what’s always needled me—

the plaque from John Paul’s Holy Jubilee,

the Norman Rockwell mugs, the Kinkade prints.

 

From underneath

a roll of batting and a bolt of chintz

I pull a faded ribbon-festooned box.

Inside, my fairy-stolen baby teeth

and first-shorn locks

acknowledge, in an elegant goodbye,  

that I was once the apple of your eye.

 

 

[© Catherine Chandler, 2026]

 

"Mayflies" by Richard Wilbur

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HERE is a short video of Richard Wilbur reading his beautiful poem, "Mayflies." 

"Can Poetry Matter?"

 

 

 

Thirty-five years ago, the essay "Can Poetry Matter?" by Dana Gioia was published in The Atlantic Monthly. It is the title essay from his book, Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture, first published by Graywolf Press in 1992.

It is one of the best essays on the subject I have ever read, and lifts my spirits, even now, when I feel that no one really cares about poetry anymore.