Friday, November 6, 2009

Today is my mother's 70th birthday; tomorrow is my father's 69th. And to think I remember the day my mother turned 30 and my 29-year-old father teased her about being old.

Anyway, even though they're unlikely to be reading this blog, I'm posting this poem from Boy Land for them, with much love.

Nostalgia

Dawn Potter

It was darker then, in the nights when the cars
came sliding around the traffic circle, when the headlights
speckled with rain traveled the bedroom walls
and vanished; when the typewriter, the squeaking chair,
the slow voice of the radio stirred the night air like a fan.
Of course, the ones we loved were beautiful--
slim, dark-haired, intent on their books.
The rain came swishing against the lamp-lit windows.
The cat purred in his chair. A clock sang,
and we lay nearly asleep, almost dreaming,
almost alone, nearly gone--the days fly so;
and the nights, like sleep, disappear without memory.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

that was good... i've been there, could feel what it was like over again ... thanks for posting that

hjmler@charter.net

Dawn Potter said...

And thank you for reading it, and for telling me it mattered.

charlotte gordon said...

Wow. I love this poem. Love it. And, this, by the way, is entirely proustian.

Anonymous said...

I enjoyed your collection of words....very much. Visual and sensory. How exactly is that entirely proustian?

Dawn Potter said...

I suppose Charlotte means "wallowing in memory by way of sensory recall." But Proust's sentences are longer, and so are his complications.