oct. 30-31

In the Land of Superstition  by Stephen Dunn
The Beginning of Something Is Always the End of Another by Sarah Freligh

How It Is by Maxine Kumin 

Cross That Line  by Naomi Shihab Nye 

Morning Song by Naomi Shihab Nye

Whose sleeves: American Tagasode by Ed Roberson

Between Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice, Today by Emily Jungmin Yoon

Stephen Dunn : https://blackbird.vcu.edu/v2n2/features/smith_r_111403/dunn_s.htm

We will continue with more Stephen Dunn Nov. 10.  So many intriguing titles...

"The Other Side of Things"

Sisyphus as Rest; Sisyphus among the Cold Dark Matter; Angels in the Rafters; A Postmortem Guide.   Always interesting to see where a poem will go when you explore old "friends".

 How's the rock rolling business going? Is your rock getting any smaller over the years?

But to be more serious, I made notes quoting Wallace Stevens:  "Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation"... why not make up a land, filled with superstitions and wander around them... pretending that we are safe with our tried and true salt thrown over the shoulder, and all we avoid,

like 13th floors and black cats.  I love Dunn's image:  "the roulette of this or that"... 

Why do we shy away from the world as it is, trying to create the world we want?  

In the discussion it came up that more people used to know about superstitions... and actually believed them.  And indeed, as Dunn says midway in the poem, "Sometimes it works"-- and if not,

we find/out fast... 

We enjoyed the title of the next poem -- usually we think "the end of something is the beginning of another" but here Freligh has reversed the role.  The "uh" sounds predominate... the images -- "ruff" of sun's first light (in a rough and tough life where you "butt" the last cigarette... the ex runs off with a slut)... The urn, the hugless state of losing a mother, and the scene at the cemetery-- the fellow who needs to dig the grave, waiting.  So many layers that reached us all.

Comments;  feel the sideways slide… the senses help us  experience the poem… invent.  physicality…  

How it is:   brought up because of  Sarah's collection Sad Math,  and Sarah had told the story of Maxine and Anne Sexton when we discussed her poem " Starting With an Old Photo of My Mother and Ending on a Hill" and the line in that poems "I will never wear her clothes. 

Poignant... the details of what is left in the pocket... putting on someone else's jacket... imagining the last day of his/her life... going backwards in time... "reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish into a ceremony of sandwich..."... which prepares perhaps the "fishing out letters", etc. the "uh" sounds here too... August... unwind... back up, unlaced, running, dumb... for the blue blazer, swelling (like Sexton's words)  into the metaphor for death, the dumb resounding, silent.

Cross that line: 

to listen: https://onbeing.org/poetry/cross-that-line/

The metaphor clear; Story of Paul Robeson... Voice carries. Discussion included remembering how Marianne Anderson. refused to sing in places with segregated seating; an  immigrant from Ukraine singing waiting for entry;

All our thoughts are lines.  

Morning Song:  from The Tiny Journalist-- the mindfulness... the fact that a tiny journalist is bigger than we are, because of her ability to tell what she sees.  Killer line: What was our crime? That we liked/ respect as they do? That we have pride.

Barricades of words and wire... how perfect to pin what divides us from understanding each other.  We loved that the ending line led to a discussion of what a "better idea" than retaliation by fire would be.  Whether it be peace, truth, or inciting people to also share what they see... Kathy reminded us of this quote by Amichai:  “From the place where we are right  flowers will never grow.”

American Tagasode:   an invitation to learn about a Japanese Elegy from over 1,000 years ago, the metaphor of a dead wife's presence in the folded sleeves of her kimono, the trigger of scent for other memories.  Here too, the style seems to fold in the spaces... 

A perfect "balancing" between Autumn Equinox, Winter Solstice... explained in the multiple meanings of "Chada" in Korean... to wear... we are worn... to pick up on Ending and Beginning theme,

today you are the youngest you will ever be... you are the oldest you have been... the coldness of the season, the heat of the tea, the chill on the skin, the work of the heart...

It brought up these reflections: we look at things from Center.  Asians look at edges. (action)

in order to see the ballet need to see what people on the outside are doing.

Othello with 4 dancers.  http://joffrey.org/othello

different ways of being … 

balance … 

Don’t Bother the Earth Spirit: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/101675/dont-bother-the-earth-spirit-who-lives-here

poems for October 23-4

Special session with Sarah Freligh

Wondrous by Sarah Freligh 

Starting With an Old Photo of My Mother and Ending on a Hill

We Smoke  (prose poem)

 Blissfield, Michigan (loose sonnet/terza rima)

Pilgrims

(from an exercise that eschews the “I” and is limited only to what you can see from your window)

A Letter to You About Myself (epistolary form)

December (extended metaphor that gains additional subtext from its placement in the book)

Last Letter to You Wherever You Are

My Friend

Geography

Comments from Rundel:
Wondrous:  Beautiful reflective poem.  Did she come up with form right away?  (answer, probably not-- after many drafts, sometimes a form suggests itself.) Where lines break, makes it feel more conversational.  Like arranging flowers… silences in music, it contributes to the whole of the tone.
How title is repeated twice at the end -- once for EB White, how the words made him cry, and once for the mother... hearing her voice say those words 10 years after her death.
How the  enjambment of  grief tumbles past the line break, through the space of a stanza brief, to fall multiplied on the verb

multiplies the one preceding it,

Starting With an Old Photo of My Mother and Ending on a Hill: I showed the picture -- read aloud the Raymond Carver, Afterglow,  spoke about the importance of going beyond description when writing an ekphrastic response.  Mike: "Every sentence is really, really good. There's no sense of a set up.  It pegs the moment, the feelings in down-to-earth language.  Shares what we go through as humans. Reminds us that when we think everything’s going according to plan, life will surprise us.   

Spoke about the sound of deciduous windows; the "shell" image Judith brought up in O Pen: in the remains of the factory... the shell of the womb of the whale, the shell of talk of the boys, blank eyes of cows as empty as parking lot.

We Smoke:  metaphore.  What smokes in us... what is muffled in our inner fire.   

Their very lives “smoke”… smoking as diversion… first stanza: smoking like a ritual… second stanza, projections of what the children they will not keep will be like; the bang up of the moth

returning them to repeat, smoke some more.  

 Blissfield, Michigan.  What a name of a town!  Showed the picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissfield,_Michigan#/media/File:Blissfield_township_business_district.JPG

everyone appreciated setting of the first moonwalk, and description with first sex-- those astronauts watching...

Pilgrims:  everyone felt the details were perfect... and how cool it was that each person had a different version of the story -- for instance the ash falling down: could be from the lit cigarette, that small act of kindness to another;  or maybe snow, the "pilgrims" not going into that bar for a drink.
Richness of sound and image:  afternoon trudges; the silver choir of bottles...  mouth feel of words (Pinsky).

A Letter to You About Myself: enjoyed the shift from present to projected future.  "I" imagines herself older.  how to construe I and you.  portrait of failing from rip in stocking to old age home.  natural flow. You could be a son or daughter of an old person, anyone at the moment or the readers of the poem.  Jim said, Required reading for all nursing staff and people in old people's homes. 

December: Loved the feisty petunia -- how stupid is often a word to describe how it feels when things aren't going the way you expect them.  A sense of unjust abandonment.    

The unexpected longevity-- and how if the Petunia didn’t give up.. maybe stupid is me… the petunia puts me to shame. 

vs. the discussion about people giving, giving, giving, but neglecting themselves from Wed. group.

Geography: only had time to briefly touch on this one.  Loved the title, the changeable nature of geography on maps; loved the leaps...  the images, how the mother slips in, her death, back to JFK in Dallas.

 MORE POEMS BY SARAH FRELIGH

Easy
The Writer’s Almanac for September 2, 2017

The Beginning of Something Is Always the End of Another
The Writer’s Almanac for July 2, 2016

Old Flame
The Writer’s Almanac for July 1, 2016

What I’ve Lost
The Writer’s Almanac for September 28, 2015

only Rundel 10/17

I cannot say I did not — Sharon Olds

The Interconnectedness of all Things by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Declaration by Tracy K. Smith

Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100  by Martin Espada

Special Problems in Vocabulary by Tony Hoagland  

What words feel humanizing to us?  The first poem captures the struggle of finding what words might answer why we are born... why we exist... and all the unsaid things that wonder if our parents wanted us,

if we are wanted by others as we go through life.  

I cannot say... is the perfect response, as it builds to the double negative:  I cannot say I did not...

and then the first line adds the verb to the  title -- but the complement of the sentence falls on the

second line.   14 of the 27 lines have the verb "ask" repeated in them.  Two of the "asks" are

interrogative.  Only two of the "asks" are not followed by "with"-- 

the opening:  I cannot say I did not ask/to be born

and then on the 21st line:  I asked, with everything I did not/have, to be born.

It is humanizing to hear another person's want:  I want to say that love/is the meaning...
and then the reflection, turning meaning into the means.  No hallmark note or easy task to 
delve into the depth of this poem!

The Emerson was to follow-up with the transcendental thought that came the century before Olds.
There is comfort in the rhyming.

The haiku is yet another version of the interconnectedness of things with all the delight of syllables
providing sounds and surprise as what is perceived as flower becomes a butterfly!


I used the erasure poem by Tracy K. Smith in the workshop on poetry for peace.
The discussion brought up many words of wisdom about our Declaration of Independence.
"nothing's changed except the numbers" --  referring to who is in power and who oppressed....
The poem leaves space to complete the unspoken... plundered our, ravaged our, destroyed the lives of our,
taking away out, abolishing our most valuable, altering the Forms of our...
We discussed industrialized slavery, the necessity of admitting flaws... the difference in attitude between
MLK and Malcolm X, / WE duBois and Brooker T Washington... 

Why is "integration a dirty word?  When we ask people to assimilate, to what are we asking them to identify?

The next poem, Alabanza, meaning Praise, is filled with the contradictions of praising all details in daily life, and all those details which destroy our well-being.  The desperation of saying alabanza, Praise-
to a  God with no face... 
and then... at the end, the exchange.  Afghan request: teach me to dance; we have no music here.
Spanish reply.  I will teach you.  Music is all we have.

We ran out of time to discuss the Hoagland... but appreciated the brilliance--
as he gives situational rope to words like "friendship", "marriage', "loss" first for small things, like a book,
then attrition of one's body, the ability to speak, 
and ending on the fact there is no word for what keeps us going...

poems for Oct. 9-10

The Rider, by Naomi Shihab Nye
Small Kindnesses by Danusha Laméris

 The Sound I Listened For by Robert Francis

Lemon Jam by Nicomedes Suárez-Araúz translated by Steven Ford Brown 

Buffalograss. by Jake Skeets

We started the class with listening to her poem, Kindness, and the story behind it.

Married for one week, she and her husband  were spending their honeymoon in Colombia, South America — and a gang came on the bus  they were riding… and took  everything — luggage, passport, money… and murdered an Indian man.  They realized that hadn’t lost everything.  They were still alive.   Later, once located in a town, a man noticed their distress and  asked them what was wrong, with such kindness in his face as he listened to their story.  She felt she only just understood this word at that moment.   That night, the poem announced itself  in her head and she found a pencil and scrap of paper to record the words.
The 13 line poem, The Rider, elicited a good 25 minutes of discussion-- and could have continued indeed! What makes the poem work?  That it had a poignant effect, perhaps is in the power of the   narrative, the personnification of loneliness, the idea of outrunning something which makes us feel disconnected (idea to which we all can relate... )
We noted the complexity of the set-up, a boy... speaking about outrunning loneliness; the speaker of the poem, wondering if outrunning could be done on bicycle... and then the final nature image,
where we are reminded, nature  is not self-reflexive, doesn't grapple with feelings... and the slowness of the falling of petals.  Every had a story, an association.
 George mentioned when he listens to the blues, he feels he can outrun any loneliness...
John brought up the danger of sentimentality and pity parties which was immediately countered by
defense of the poem which is neither sentimental, nor self-indulgent.  David brought up Robert Frost,
the wish (poem title?) and the dealing with what there is.
Martin brought up that we are never alone -- we always have our shadow.

Danusha Laméris's first name means “morning star” in Slavic and “bow” (as in “bow and arrow”) in Sanskrit.  Dutch father and a mother from the island of Barbados,  her family lived, briefly, in Beirut, Lebanon ... Her book was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye.  Indeed, a similar sense to her poems.

The ends of lines feel like a breath;  We discussed small act of kindness as antidote to loneliness. gestures of connection… and Kathy brought up 

I see you.  I am here. S. Africa. Greetings in South Africa, and translation “I see you.”  response.  “I am here”  (perhaps after the session 10/16 we can discuss the words of connection.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_philosophy

Thank you Kathy B. for the quote from Martin Espada about  Nicomedes Suárez-Araúz in the poem Lemon Jam translated by Steven Ford Brown

"any poet  who can look at  ground cinnamon and see the rusted armor of the conquistator has found the crossroads between imagination and history.”

And as always, thank you’s to everyone’s observations, sharing of background.  It is definitely the spirit of Ubuntu (see above) — I close with sharing Archbishop Desmond Tutu's definition in a 1999.

"A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, based from a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.”

The Sound I Listened For by Robert Francis, a student encouraged by Frost, indeed has overtones of the "sound of sense" which governs the sonnet.   Francis takes us to a moment of partnership between man and horse with the sound of the mower,  like a musical score moving through time.  The line about patience running through the strength as voice and horses haul intrigued both groups.

Lemon Jam:  Kathy B. commented on Martin Espada saying this about the poet:

Nicomedes Suárez-Araúz:  "Any poet  who can look at  ground cinnamon and see the rusted armor of  conquistadors has found the crossroads between imagination and history/". 

How can you not love a poet who says

"Scrape away the peel of day" -- to squeeze the juice of it, make a syrup with it... and thus, with a sunrise, it is indeed, "sweet,/with no bitterness at all," and the contrast with the huts in the Amazon,

the invasion of the Spaniards which destroyed their life, is a crazy jam of paradox and highly effective.

to find out more about the yanomami:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/world/yanomami/

Buffalograss:

a lot of free association.  It helps to read the note first:   

About This Poem

 “This poem began as a conversation between the Navajo words anáá' and anaa'. Anáá' can be translated to ‘eye’ and anaa' can be translated into ‘war.’ The act of desire can become violent, especially between Native men. I imagined a man seeing another man naked in front of him for the first time; these men become engaged in wants of the eye, desires of the body, but also in an act of war. The couplet, a form that wants harmony between two lines, seemed to be the most perfect fit to speak toward this tension, this desire, this war.”
—Jake Skeets

The poem is perhaps meant to be unintelligible… secret. private.  We loved the reference of the cottonwood trees --
"the letter t vibrating in cottonwoods" which prepares the ear for the line 
" His tongue a mosquito whispering

its name a hymn on mesquite"

Nature Aria: exactly what it is and how what should be free of anxiety, is not, with a sense of menacing at the end.

Rundel will discuss more in depth : I cannot say I did not 

Pittsford : discussions of mother/daughter; eternal life, etc.

October 2-3

HOW TO CONSTRUCT A SONNET  by Bruce Bennett

Mexican American Sonnet by Iliana Rocha

American Sonnet for the New Year  — Terrance Hayes

Sonnet by Billy Collins

American Sonnet — by Billy Collins

For Example  by Adrienne Rich

You Say You Said  by Marianne Moore

We Are Saying Yes, But Who Are We to Say  BY KHALED MATTAWA

Cleverness!  Bruce Bennett''s playfulness takes alternating rhyme, includes a volta, and off we go,

abab Donne... aha!  we go Shakespearian... make another choice at line 8, open or closed?

As for the term "American Sonnet" , much can be found about the liberties (perhaps a sonnet's pursuit of happiness?) by the adjective.

"The American Sonnet was the creation of James Gates Percival (1795-1856)

His sonnets are beautiful productions. Illegitimate in form, they yet show a true conception of what the sonnet ought to be, in tone, general structure, and character of melody. In several cases the poet invented a form of his own, by a novel and a not ineffective disposition of rhymes"

  For a Mexican-American  sonnet,  the rhyming words paint a picture of the Mexico of the speaker : "tenedors" with cathedral floors; want with "Verdad"; asks/pasts; hurricane/migraine; inwardness/sadness.  The note "about the poem" mentions that the "ultimate rebellion of Chicansas is through sexuality" but neither group noted it.  "To disrupt a hurricane's path with our own inwardness" coupled with the rhyming words, "migraine and sadness" points to what the poet calls "internalized self-hatred... the irony being "while individuals with racist and discriminatory views are erroneous in their worry about the negative effects of immigrants on the external world, it is the world of the Mexican speaker of the poem, that her internal world is under duress.  

We loved the Terrance Hayes poem -- the use of adverbs, the pile up of repetitions. 

Things do get terribly ugly incredibly quickly.  3 end rhymes of quickly... and one reads it quickly...
the word "ugly" repeated each line except the penultimate... "regularly, truly quickly things got really incredibly and hopefully ends it up.

The Billy Collins sonnet is a playful , demonstration of unrhymed 14-liners.  The American Sonnet, adopts the same playful spirit, written in tercets -- playing on "stanza" by calling the space "little room" like a postcard poem on vacation  and ending with "Back in the typed line/was room for everything."
It's in quotes...  Perhaps he is referring to the Adrienne Rich poem... perhaps graffiti?  
Lots of lovely sensory details... but also poking fun at human nature... the "postcard-sized" trivialities we express to each other.

The Adrienne Rich poem is intriguing and alluring… and also refers to "sounds too // that live in a typed line"...   The title starts in media res... 
For Example...  
What is the context?  By the end of the first tercet, you know it's about poetry... 

The Marianne Moore, also makes a commentary on the treachery of language. Her title, "You Say You Said" is intriguing...and needs the first line "Few words are best" in quotes to be understood.   Her line breaks, indentations, repeat of Disgust .. first, in a short sentence, for its discretion, (like  the equinox/ all things  in /One.  The rest of the poem in 13 lines gives voice and is the voice of disgust.  One participant summed it up this way: disgust helps me against dishonesty… It certainly intimates the 20’s aggressive isolationism/. immigration laws… 

A twist on the title,  We Are Saying Yes, But Who Are We to Say  BY KHALED MATTAWA.  We listened to him read his poem: it is read with intense anger. emphasis and power, changes tone at the end. The  Arab Spring 32 years ago… comes out in  "do I go back?" in this  narrative of wrestling… Oh dear lord... and it
feels there is answer to his prayer, where the  real baby does indeed ensure a new beginning

poems for September 25-6

September by W.S. Merwin
Monologue for an Onion by Suji Kwock Kim

I'm Working on the World by Wislawa Szymborska

Before I Was a Gazan  by Naomi Shihab Nye - 1952

For Keeps  by Joy Harjo - 1951-
Don't Go into the library -- by Alberto Rios
Shikwah by Khaled Mattawa


The first poem was written by Merwin in 1976, (age 73) before he lived in Hawaii, in a collection called. Writing to an unfinished accompaniment.

Paul noted that the first 11 lines describe  nature images,  quiescent as opposed to the  motion in next 11 lines.

Each object is an eye. 
Reminded David of other Autumn poems, like Keats' Ode, and Wallace Stevens, 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/13261/sunday-morning

A beautiful weaving of everything together.  Poetry without punctuation invites the reader to try
to make sense of the words, how to interpret lines, enjambments.  We struggled with
"month of eyes" -- it is an apostrophe?  the "you" mentioned that puts your hand /in my hand?
John sees "eyes" in September -- which has three of them... We also wondered about "boats of the spirit"  --- and yet, without knowing, that didn't change the appreciation of imagining the turning
from night to day, the wandering mist in early morning-- never to come back--
which heightens an appreciation for the "what is now"... where or whatever the shore is, there is a sense of  drawing to a close of a voyage in an incessant journey.
What governs a day under its own king?

We loved the Monologue for an Onion.  With the title one expects the speaker not to be an onion,
which allows for a clever personnification of the onion.  What great verbs that describe what we do
to an innocent onion... no wonder it makes us cry... we are exposed for what we are... deluded,
filled with desire, chopping and weeping idiots.  Is this the way to go through life?
What relationship do we seek in union... or with onion.  The world seen through veils.  Of course!
and we?  hungry to know where meaning is... but the poet uses enjambment... where meaning/
lies with a double entendre of "resting" and "not being truthful."  The line "whatever you meant to love, in meaning to// does not find solution in the next line, but is interrupted...
a core that is// not one.
Someone quoted Sandburg:  Life is like an onion.  You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.

The craving we all have, the fantasy,  to peel away layers thinking then, we will understand… 

intellect fails.  

What do you get when you peel back an onion?  An onion! 

The Szymborska poem is brilliantly translated and we speculated if the translators felt the same delight they created for us in English, working with the Polish.  So, the world is a book... one we can revise, improve... with chapters... for instance on speech... How it can make you feel quite extraordinary when trading a "hi there" with a fish... suspected meanings...  time, suffering, death... 

The poem by Naomi Shihab Nye was a beautiful example of what could be everyday... 13 lines

about a math homework problem, 6 short lines of a world subtracted.  An 19 line sentence followed

by one more in two lines:  And now, I would do anything/for a problem I could solve.

What problems can we solve?  How do we deal with unsolvable?

The Auden, in 4 nicely rhymed quatrains seems perhaps a bit contrived, a bit light.  His deft use

of "stars that do not give a damn"... We concluded that happiness comes from feeling you love sufficiently…   There's a reassurance in that although human, we are born with the capacity to love.

The title is more enigmatic that pinning down one person... but the bigger concept of being more loving 

when in relationship as a goal... the ending line, is so cleverly understated... as if to sound almost silly,

and yet, it is dead serious:  when all is dark, empty, just the IDEA of finding that sublime, eventually,

can only come by exercising the heart.

For Keeps reminded us of other "dream" poems -- Martin Luther King, Langston Hughes, 

Short sentences, and then two two-line sentences that are about relationship.  Mystery.  And we are part of it.

Don't go into the Library had us in stitches!  History has pegged . knowledge as dangerous Ah... burn the books... keep the people ignorant..!  Paradoxical intention a wonderful ploy... and the great suspension of

couplets... Don't go in.  If you do....  couplet break, another couplet, another couplet break, another line...

you'll come out of there/holding something in your arms.

Sight, touch, smell, taste... Ah yes that dangerous library, full/of answers... and then the clincher...

how it changes us... 

We ended on Shikwah, a poem filled with questions... for more about the poet: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/khaled-mattawa
Hard not to think of Arab Spring... of the partition of Pakistan, reading this complaint to God...
And like Auden, can we be the more loving one?  We must praise God... perhaps God won't care,
just as the stars won't care... but we could care enough to wonder how God might feel if we cut him out of our life... 

poems for September 19 (Rundel)

see the line-up and discussion of 9/18.

SWIMMING IN A WATERING CAN—  by Bruce Bennett

WORDS FOR THE STRAY by Bruce Bennet as response to

 Don Kimball's, Burial for a Stray

Degeneration

ON RECEIVING A NOTE AND PICTURE FROM A FORMER STUDENT ANNOUNCING SHE HAS BECOME A GRANDPARENT
MY LIFE
side by side of Dylan Thomas “Do not go Gentle”  with your “Go Gentle”…
I read outlaid at the end of the session: At Rose's Range by R. S. Gwynn. 

I had written this to Bruce:

For me, I’d love to know more about what inspires your “loose cannon” in the canon!
Indeed, he has taught each author parodied.  We didn't get to finding out more of 

This Is Just To Say  // This is just to confess and A Time to Talk (Frost) and No Time to Talk — Bruce Bennett

“The Cult of Eating” and Elizabeth Bishop “The Art of Losing”  or
 first line match-up of Ezra Pound's Portrait d'une Femme                                             

 and your Portrait of a Neighborhood. 
or whether he was  thinking of Goethe, in Gaming Parnassus? 

**
The Rundel group did indeed discuss the side by side villanelles... noting that the younger Dylan Thomas, raging,
and asking his father to rage against the dying, was appropriate, whereas the more balanced, kindly "why rage, it's
what it is" comes from a longer life filled with experience.   One was pure emotion, the other a sermon from an old man filled with questions.  Why not?  Why rage?  May it not make sense...?  Fight no more?  Pass on with dignity? Obey
the clear command?  We stumbled at the light-/ line-break to - en.

We also discussed the "On Receiving a Note" etc.  We enjoyed the form... and the fabulous enjambment over
a stanza break between the 3rd and 4th stanza.  "what they take from her/

that makes me part of them...

A lovely sense of family... re-connection.