Josie Glausiusz’s wonderful May 25 Thursday Opinion essay, “Poems offered me an anchor as I lost my son, so I shared them,” set me off on a journey of memories, from nursery rhymes read to me by my mother, memorizing “Jabberwocky” and the other poems of Lewis Carroll as a child, then reading to my own children and grandchildren and, in later years, writing poems myself.
A few snapshots are vivid: My husband read “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” to my son when he was 3 or 4, and though the meanings certainly were beyond him, he loved the sounds of the words. We had a student from Iran visiting us many years ago, and I recited some of the verses to him from Edward FitzGerald’s English translation, and he recited the same verses to me in Farsi, and before long we were both crying. When I was driving my school-age grandchildren somewhere on a snowy day, I recited Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and they said, “Do it again.” When I met my husband, I showed him a poem I had written about my father’s death when I was 6, and he cried.
What is it about poetry that makes it so much more powerful than prose? I don’t know, but thank heaven for a lifetime of reading and remembering. My life has been full of the joy of words. With Omar, I say: When you “reach the Spot where I made one — turn down an empty Glass!”
Maryanne Kendall, Reston
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