Good Poems for Hard Times by Garrison Keillor

“Read the following poems from

Good Poems for Hard Times by Garrison Keillor

(Hint: pay particular attention to issues of memory and the ways the poems treat the daily and quotidian; the small moments and the “ordinary”:

Lisel Mueller, “Things” p. 104

Maria Mazziotti Gillan, After School on Ordinary Days” p. 135

Noel Coward, “Nothing is Lost” p. 208

Patricia Hampl, “This is How Memory Works” p. 236″

Things

By Lisel Mueller

What happened is, we grew lonely

Living among the things,

So we gave the clock a face,

The chair a back, the table four stout legs

which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues

As smooth as our own

And hung tongues inside bells

So we could listen

To their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful profiles

the pitcher received a lip,

the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us was recast in our image,

we gave the country a heart, the storm an eye,

the cave a mouth

so we could pass into safety.

After School on Ordinary Days

By Maria Mazziotto Gillan

After school on ordinary days we listened

to The Shadow and The Lone Ranger

as we gathered around the tabletop radio

that was always kept on the china cabinet

built into the wall in that tenement kitchen,

a china cabinet that held no china, except

thick and white and utilitarian,

cups and saucers, poor people’s cups

from the 5 & 10 cent store.

My mother was always home

from Ferraro’s Coat factory

by the time we walked in the door

after school on ordinary days,

and she’d give us milk with Bosco in it

and cookies she’d made that weekend.

The three of us would crowd around the radio,

listening to the voices that brought a wider world

into our Paterson apartment. Later we’d have supper at the kitchen table,

the house loud with our arguments

and laughter. After suffer on ordinary days, our homework finished, we’d play

monopoly or gin rummy, the kitchen

warmed by the huge coal stove, the wind

outside rattling the loose old windows,

we inside, tucked in, warm and together,

on ordinary days that we didn’t know

until we looked back across a distance

of forty years would glow and shimmer

in memory’s flickering light.

Nothing Is Lost

By Noel Coward

Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told

lie all our memories, lie all the notes

Of all the music we have ever heard

And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,

Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,

Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes

Each sentimental souvenir and token

Everything seen, experienced, each word

Addressed to us in infancy, before

Before we could even know or understand

The implications of our wonderland.

There they all are, the legendary lies

The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears

Forgotten debris of forgotten years

Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise

Before our world dissolves before our eyes

Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,

A word, a tune, a known familiar scent

An echo from the past when, innocent

We looked upon the present with delight

And never knew the loneliness of night.

Things Is How Memory Works

By Patricia Hampl

You are stepping off a train.

A wet blank night, the smell of cinders.

A gust of steam from the engine swirls

Around the hem of your topcoat, around

The hand that, a moment ago, slicked back

The hair and then put on the fedora

In front of the mirror with the beveled

Edges in the cherrywood compartment.

The girl standing on the platform

in the Forties dress

has curled her hair, she has

nylon stockings___no, silk stockings still.

Her shoulders are touchingly military,

Squared by those shoulder pads

and sweet faith in the Allies.

She is waiting for you.

She can be wearing a hat, if you like.