American Life in Poetry #8: Karma Larsen.

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of poems have been written to express the grief of losing a parent. Many of the most telling of these attach the sense of loss to some object, some personal thing left behind, as in this elegy to her mother by a Nebraskan, Karma Larsen:


Moonflowers
Milly Sorensen, January 16, 1922 - February 19, 2004

It was the moonflowers that surprised us.
Early summer we noticed the soft gray foliage.
She asked for seedpods every year but I never saw them in her garden.
Never knew what she did with them.
Exotic and tropical, not like her other flowers.
I expected her to throw them in the pasture maybe,
a gift to the coyotes. Huge, platterlike white flowers
shining in the night to soften their plaintive howling.
A sound I love; a reminder, even on the darkest night,
that manicured lawns don't surround me.

Midsummer they shot up, filled the small place by the back door,
sprawled over sidewalks, refused to be ignored.
Gaudy and awkward by day,
by night they were huge, soft, luminous.
Only this year, this year of her death
did they break free of their huge, prickly husks
and brighten the darkness she left.


Poem copyright by Karma Larsen, and reprinted by permission of the author. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.



Also at Virtual Grub Street by/about Ted Kooser:

• The Ted Kooser Page: Links to online Interviews, Recordings, Poetry, Prose, Reviews, Photos and more;
• American Gothic (a review of Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser. Copper Canyon Press, 2004);
• Ted Kooser and the American Life in Poetry column;
• American Life in Poetry #1: David Allan Evans;
• American Life in Poetry #2: Jonathan Greene;
• American Life in Poetry #3: Marnie Walsh;
• American Life in Poetry #4: Ruth Stone;
• American Life in Poetry #5: David Baker;
• American Life in Poetry #6: Barton Sutter;
• American Life in Poetry #7: Leonard Nathan;
• American Life in Poetry #9: James Doyle;
• American Life in Poetry #10: Marge Piercy;
• American Life in Poetry #11: David Wagoner;
• American Life in Poetry #12: Andrei Guruianu;
• American Life in Poetry #13: Kevin Griffith;
• American Life in Poetry #14: Georgiana Cohen;
• American Life in Poetry #15: Janet McCann;
• American Life in Poetry #16: Lisel Mueller;
• American Life in Poetry #17: Wendell Berry;
• American Life in Poetry #18: Dan Gerber;
• American Life in Poetry #19: Shirley Buettner;
• American Life in Poetry #20: Jane Hirshfield;
• American Life in Poetry #21: Karin Gottshall;
• American Life in Poetry #22: Jean L. Connor;
• American Life in Poetry #23: E. G. Burrows;
• American Life in Poetry #24: Martin Walls;
• American Life in Poetry #25: Rodney Torreson;
• American Life in Poetry #26: Claudia Emerson;
• American Life in Poetry #27: Angela Shaw.