For Alisa
Her lovely head carries all the summer gold
And I follow her from room to room
The way one chases sunlight in winter.
She stops at the mirror and looks at us both
Through the sky of her eyes, which we know
Erupts in storms of tears that clear as quickly
As they arrive. She looks deep enough
Into me that I can read her on my own:
“I want you to see what I see,” she says.
The mirror memorizes our faces,
Mine ageing, hers framed by an endless
String of pony tails, pigtails and braids.
*
She sings the hours into a timelessness
Where she invents the music and the words,
The conversations with the birds
Outside the windows, the flock of quails
Traveling through our garden
On their way who knows where–
In this way inventing me too, so now
I am no longer mother but again a child
Seeing things I did not know to look for.
Carmen Bugan, a George Orwell Prize Fellow, is the author of five poetry collections, a memoir, and a critical study. Her new and selected poems,
Lilies from America, is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.
Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, won the Bread Loaf Conference Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction, and was a finalist in the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her critical study is
Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile, and her book of essays,
Poetry and the Language of Oppression, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.She has a doctorate in English literature from Balliol College, Oxford University, UK. Bugan, who was the 2018 Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan, lectures at universities, international book fairs and conferences, and has been a guest on current affairs and history programs on the
BBC,
ABC,
NPR,
The Foreign Desk (Monocle, London).
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Author: Carmen Bugan
Carmen Bugan, a George Orwell Prize Fellow, is the author of five poetry collections, a memoir, and a critical study. Her new and selected poems, Lilies from America, is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, won the Bread Loaf Conference Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction, and was a finalist in the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her critical study is Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile, and her book of essays, Poetry and the Language of Oppression, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. She has a doctorate in English literature from Balliol College, Oxford University, UK. Bugan, who was the 2018 Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan, lectures at universities, international book fairs and conferences, and has been a guest on current affairs and history programs on the BBC, ABC, NPR, The Foreign Desk (Monocle, London).
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