I found this poem while reading August’s edition of The Sun magazine, and find it really beautiful. For those of you who don’t read poetry often – consider this your daily (or weekly) dose of culture!
At 43 by Harriet Brown
Awake in the dark, again,
I want each looming thing -
night table, dresser, chair -
to set its demons free,
settle for being ordinary.
Beside me, my husband
grinds his teeth,
damned like the rest of us
with the curse of breathing.
What I didn’t understand
on the other side of 40:
despair, too, is something
to hold on to. I’ve got
my dead: a ribbon’s worth
of rabbit-soft gray fur
from the cat who was
my best friend through my 20s,
her name the first word
both my daughters said.
We buried her last winter,
boiling pot after pot of water
for the frozen ground,
trying to dig deep enough.
We did.
