On a tough day, Rita Dove delivers the last word

May 5, 2013 | Tags: Chloe Yelena Miller, Mid Atlantic region, National Poetry Month, Poetry, Poets, Reading, Rita Dove, social justice, teaching, women, writing

Rita Dove 2010 Washington DC writer and teacher, Chloe Yelena Miller invited me to be guest blogger on April 30, last day of National Poetry Month 2013. A chilly month, a tough month, a gorgeous month, a month honoring poetry.

Here in the mid-Atlantic, April ended with blue sky, brilliant stars, trees heavy in blossom, spring flowers bursting into every crystal of sunlight. I attended poetry readings all month long during April and Rita Dove’s, most of all, served me. In the piece, I reflect on how her poems worked me over. A few hours earlier, I had learned my son was hunkered in his New Bedford apartment in a city under lock-down, during a tough week for all of us, for many reasons. As Dove said toward the end of her reading, she had taken us up and up, reading poems about family and dancing and identity–and she paused to decide:

“Should I take you up some more, or bring you down?”

In the dark and beautiful recital hall she read “Meditation at Fifty Yards, Moving Target.” Did we plummet in that hush, or had we been given wings? My reflections, here.