Cold Shadow

A Place Only We Know

As we cruise into the middle of National Poetry Month, the cherry trees we planted last year burst with pink blossoms. Everything dormant feels like it’s waking up. That’s what spring is, really, a return to what quietly bides times.

Writing a poem can be like that, too. All the truth we need is there, underneath something else, waiting. We just have to find it.

The title poem in my latest collection, The Banished and the Dead was based on something that happened to me in 1970. I was twelve. My father had moved out two years before to marry someone else, and though we had court-ordered visits, he often canceled them. My mother taught summer school and was out of the house most of the day. I was on my own. I didn’t mind. A devoted pianist, I practiced by the hour and otherwise ran around with my best friend who lived two houses down.

Summer reached its lazy peak in July, and one still, hot afternoon, the phone rang. It was a Western Union operator with a telegram for my mother from someone in Europe. The message was in French, a language I was fluent in because my family went to Paris for a year when I was six. The operator read it out letter by letter, and I copied it down. My grandfather, who lived in Switzerland, had died. I didn’t know what to do. My mother was in class. There was no way to reach her. I waited for her to come home, and when I heard her car, I went down with the paper in my hand. She read the note in silence, then said, “Now I’m alone.” Her mother died before I was born, her ex-husband was married to someone else; her father was now gone; but she still had me. What did I feel? Betrayal? Anger?

I wasn’t sure until I wrote the poem and described myself as the “cold shadow at her side.”

Not all poems are autobiographical, but they all come from a place only we know. Our job is to make others know it, too.

Spend time with poetry and see how it can widen the world.

Thank you for reading. Find me at www.anneleighparrish.com and my photography at www.laviniastudios.com.