The words of the person in this week’s poem are simple and deeply felt. She looks back on a life and looks over human centuries. The final line, a series of related images, is somehow imbued with it all.

Lee Sharkey’s most recent books include “Walking Backwards” (Tupelo, 2016) and “Calendars of Fire” (Tupelo, 2013). Her recognitions include the Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize, the Abraham Sutzkever Centennial Translation Prize, the RHINO Editors’ Prize, and the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance’s Distinguished Achievement Award.

Like You

By Lee Sharkey

I had a mother.

I had a thin man towering over her.

I had before birth ever after

and a name for every thing in the kingdom.

 

Now I have memory.

Of pensive, of riven, faces.

Gravestones subsiding to forest.

Books, covenants, and dust.

 

Now I have knowledge. Of rain,

obsession, contrition, isms to die by.

My hands move knowledgeably

over each other’s topography.

 

I am grateful if spring follows winter.

Like you I can name my terrors.

Where have the centuries gone?

Oak apple crab apple iron gall blossom.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is poet who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2018 Lee Sharkey. It appears here by permission of the author. For an archive of all the poems that have appeared in this column, go to www.pressherald.com/tag/deep-water.

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