Love Poems in Quarantine - Softcover

Ruhl, Sarah

 
9781556596308: Love Poems in Quarantine
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1556596308 ISBN 13: 9781556596308
Verlag: Copper Canyon Press, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

An award-winning, multi-genre writer grapples with the pandemic, death of George Floyd, and other crises of our times in gnomic poems written from inside the purgatory (and sudden revelations) of quarantine.

Writing from and toward “the endless desire / to be at home in the world,” Sarah Ruhl wrote Love Poems in Quarantine to mark the passage of time when all familiar landmarks disappeared. From the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic, to the murder of George Floyd, to months of simultaneous quarantine and protest, this is—in free verse and form, lamentation and meditation—a book of days, a survival kit for spiritual malady. These poems find small solace in domestic absurdities. Even in global crisis, there is the laundry. The dog rolls in something putrid, the child interrupts a Zoom meeting, and dinner must get made, again and again. Using language to travel and touch when bodies could not, Ruhl has drawn with great care a portrait of a year unlike any other in history.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sarah Ruhl is a playwright, poet, and essayist. She has been a two-time Pulitzer prize finalist, a Tony award nominee, and the recipient of the MacArthur "genius" award. She teaches at the Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn with her children and husband.

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What are we folding when we are folding laundry in quarantine

Standing four feet apart,
you take one edge of the sheet,
I take the other.

We walk towards one another,
creating order.

Like solemn campers folding a flag
in the early morning light.
But this is no flag.
This is where we love and sleep.

There was a time we forgot to do this—
to fold with and toward one another,
to make the edges clean together.

My grandmother might have said:

There is always more laundry to do—
and that is a blessing because it means
you did more living
which means you get to do more cleaning.

We forgot for a while
that one large blanket
is too difficult for one chin to hold
and two hands to fold alone—

That there is more beauty
in the walking toward the fold,
and in the shared labor.


For my sister Kate because I can’t fly to Chicago to dance with you on your big birthday during quarantine

We two sisters made up dances in the cold room.
You flung me over your shoulder.
I skiddled through your legs.
You were strong enough to hold me.
You still are.

At weddings we shocked and delighted
all the man-lady wedding pairs by dancing together crazy, sisters.
You dipped me, my head grazing the ground.
You were strong so I didn’t hurt my head.
You still are.

The body in flight was never easy for me
but you leant me that joy, that motion.

Giddy. Laughing at the air,
so insubstantial, when the arms slice through.


On Homesickness, Back when we Traveled

What is your malady?

Asked the form at the community acupuncture clinic.
My pen hovered—so many to choose from:
the thyroid, the gut, the face.
I found myself writing:

Homesickness.

I handed in my form. I wondered if the doctor
with the needles would laugh at me,
but he said instead:

I am homesick too.

And then he put needles in my ears and my ankles
and I fell asleep.
Around me, strangers slept
needled dreams, under warm blankets.

And I thought:
at home in the world.
The endless desire to be
at home in the world.


Separating the laundry, June 6

I separate white laundry from colors.
I pour in bleach to make “my whites whiter”.
And yesterday Breonna Taylor had her birthday
only she was dead.

And yesterday Donald Trump said what a great
day it was for George Floyd
only he was dead.

And I pour in a capful of bleach,
the same bleach Donald Trump advised
us to drink so we don’t get the plague.
And I contemplate rage.

And I think about my white skin while
I do my laundry.


Mothers’ Day

Before the world was burning (and it is always burning)
I read about the history of Mother’s Day,
how the apostrophe mysteriously jumped
from Mothers’ to Mother’s, over time.
That jumping punctuation hid the the original purpose of the day.

When Mother’s Day was Mothers’ Day (meaning all mothers, plural),
Julia Ward Howe, an abolitionist and suffragist,
called for a day where mothers could work for peace.
When Mother’s Day was Mothers’ Day, she said:
mothers have had enough of their sons being murdered in wars—
we should love other women’s sons as much as our own,
across nations, across tribes,
so that murder on a large scale never happens again.
When Mother’s Day was Mothers’ Day, she called upon women
to raise their voices, gather, sing, pray and insist upon peace.
She knew that peace was work.

Now that Mothers’ Day is Mother’s Day, (apostrophe before the S),
some individual women have breakfast in bed,
one day of appreciation for their labor.
Now that Mothers’ Day is Mother’s Day, we pay florists and the Hallmark company.
Sometimes mothers (I imagine them to be white) don’t get a waffle in bed and are sad.

But the original Mothers’ Day proclaimed:
Peace is as peace does.
To make peace, we say.
Peace is a doing, a making.

Can we get out of bed and do the work of peace?
To say: No mother’s child should be murdered by the state.
And then to say out loud those mothers’ names,
even as George Floyd cried out for his mother
before he was murdered:
Larcenia Floyd.
Tamika Palmer. Wanda Cooper-Jones. Gwen Carr.
Mamie Till Mobley: who chose to keep her son’s casket open
for all the world to see.


I am running out of things to cook

Tater-tots are the
food of the gods but you can’t
eat them every day.


And that is enough for now

Day unfolded, the
children were fed three times, and
day folded back into night.


Love poem to my husband who fixed the Scotch tape dispenser today
The tape was unseen,
trapped in itself; you found the
beginning again.


Remembered poem of a 2nd grader named Patrick who I taught in Queens, twenty five years ago

Sing while you think.
A poem is not so hard if you
sing while you think.

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Verlag
Copper Canyon Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1556596308
ISBN 13 
9781556596308
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
163
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