“Let living room pianos invite unwashed hands”
September 30, 2011 § 1 Comment
My new poetry post in front of the house has been standing empty for about a month while I considered what would be the right poem to inaugurate the little box with a glass front and a hinged lid. Should it be a poem about poetry? Should it be about music? Should it be something silly or something deep? Should I look to old favorites like Shelley and Keats or get one of my poet-friends to contribute?
Today I finally took the plunge and printed up the first poem, by Sarah Lindsay: Zucchini Shofar
I wish I could figure out how to make the poem display on this page, but if you click on the link you’ll get it.
I have loved this poem for several years and every time I read it, including just now, during the Days of Awe, standing in front of my house and reading it through the glass of the poetry box, I am smitten with the feeling that I wrote it myself, or could have, or would have, had I been a poet and been at that wedding and heard the sounding zucchini and all those nieces and nephews playing their instruments or if I had ever thought of making the plumbing in a half-built house resound with a trumpeting raspberry or ever realized that the ephemeral art I practice has everything in common with butter that melts into homemade cornbread.
L’Shanah Tova!
An exquisite poem and as close as conceivable to your earthy perspective on the nature of transcendence. I would be in your klezmer vegetable band if I were not Deafened; no wait, I am your cymbals, wielding my pumpkin halves with squishy bilateral abandon & singing parts like a deaf siamese cat in her stairwell. It feels that good so we do it!