Poem for Thursday

The Burglary
By Linda Pastan

They stole my mother's silver,
melting it down, perhaps,

into pure mineral, worth
only its own weight.

We must eat with our hands now,
grab for food

in this new place of greed,
our table set

only with memories, tarnishing
even as we speak:

my mother holding a shining ladle
in her hand,

serving the broth
to children who will forget

to polish her silver, forget even
to lock the house.

While forks and spoons are divided
from all purpose,

patterns are lost like friezes
after centuries of rain,

and every knife is robbed
of its cutting edge.

--------

Another from this week's New Yorker.

It was an unexciting day here -- Adam had a half-day of school so I had a bunch of chores I had to do in the morning, then I took him to the orthodontist when he got home, where we waited longer than expected as usual, but there is a new bubble tea place that opened in the same stall where the old bubble tea place closed a couple of months ago, so it was a good trip! Otherwise I have little else to report; I was reminded today in several different places why I no longer talk about politics except in locked entries where I trust everyone who is reading them, and moreover I was reminded that I can't trust everyone I tend to assume I can trust just because they've never said anything that upset me before, and even people who make perfect sense in blogs and journals tend to sound thoughtless when they only get 140 characters or the visible length of a status update.

Watched Glee, was relieved by the absence of several characters from this week's storyline, but I don't think I've ever been less emotionally invested in a gay character on a TV series before -- I miss Jack on Dawson's Creek, he seemed so much more real to me -- and I am so tired of the Jewish girl being nothing but the self-invested diva (am I supposed to find a way to read her ambitions as feminist empowerment, because it's not working). I love the musical numbers a lot, but I find myself wishing it was more like "Once More With Feeling" and the songs really struck home for me because I cared so much about the characters. Of course, I am cranky because Eastwick was not on and this will soon be a permanent situation on Wednesdays. And Veteran's Day makes me sad -- my family members who actually fought in the world wars (my grandparents' siblings) survived, it was the ones living in Europe who didn't.

Here are some more photos from the Swedish festival we visited last weekend. I am not sure why wooden penguins are Swedish, since I thought they lived closer to the other pole, but of course Adam was pleased!