Showing posts with label mothers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mothers. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 31, 2023

To Have Been: Old Letters

To keep old letters,
or to throw them away?--
much more difficult
than Hamlet's question.

Letters from my mother
in her neat handwriting--
to me when I taught
in Germany. Letters

from former girlfriends--
& "girlfriend" now seems
as antique as ink missives
crawling along mail routes.

I hate to destroy someone's
writing. I see the people
sitting at a desk or a table,
taking time to shape sentences,

to somehow slip news
and feeling into scrawl....
sealing the envelope....
attaching stamps....

Words, preserved--
a pickling of thought.
Eventually we all have to
wreck evidence of our lives:

To have been, or not to have been.


hans ostrom 2023

Thursday, December 1, 2022

Newborn

wrinkled from mother-water
eyes closed to the Mystery
old person's seaweed hair
fingers thin as tendrils
accepts odors, sounds, dry-
warmth. hears its own gurgling
cry. does it yet ask why?

hans ostrom 2022

*Henry Morgan Ostrom, born November 23, 2022