April 17 Poetry: Request by Frannie Lindsay

This book of poetry has been sitting on my shelf for several years.  Having made it through moves I've never really spent time with it until recently.  An adult's reflections on growing up being abused by her father this book is stark.  As a parent I'm shaken up... On the other hand some of the poems capture the relationships that we have with our pets...and intimacy as profound as parts of parenthood.

Good, challenging, beautiful stuff.


This poem in particular is not about abuse or pets...about "the end of the world..." it's so ordinary. . . so simple...so much what I want to do everytime I go into a bookstore period. It's great!


Request

Lord, at the end of the world
let me spread out my coat

and sit down on the floor
in the back

of a secondhand bookstore,
and lower my head and rejoice in the glory

of all my unreadiness, then
take off my old, unfixable glasses.


Lindsay, Frannie Lamb. Perugia Press. Florence, MA 2006. 57.