"What You Kept" is based on a very bittersweet experience, the clearing out of my parents' home after their deaths, my mother in 2011 and my father in 2012.
The poem is addressed to my mother, and is the fourth poem in the long poem in The Frangible Hour entitled "Four Songs of Parting". The poem was also a finalist for the Able Muse Write Prize, as part of a two-part elegy, "Discovery".
I hope you'll consider purchasing The Frangible Hour once it becomes available. I'll let you all know as soon as I do!
What
You Kept
A mildewed trunk
defending old receipts,
a cookie tin,
discolored
carpets, pillowcases, sheets.
Easy enough, as
are the Mason jars—
stuff for the
trash or the recycling bin,
the church
bazaars.
I toss aside
what’s always needled me—
the plaque from
John Paul’s Holy Jubilee,
the Norman
Rockwell mugs, the Kinkade prints.
From underneath
a roll of batting
and a bolt of chintz
I pull a faded
ribbon-festooned box.
Inside, my
fairy-stolen baby teeth
and first-shorn
locks
acknowledge, in an
elegant goodbye,
that I was once
the apple of your eye.
-- Catherine Chandler
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