for Rita Dove

for Rita Dove

Ms. Rita Dove
would not have loved
my mama's kitchen,
all pink-and-white-tiled
in sterile cold precision,
like a 1950's doctors office.
Not a live green thing there,
and nothing dead,
but the silence of lost dreams.

You could not write
smooth American poems there
rolling to the limits of the page.

Our Philco never held
fresh-cut flowers,
only sprinkled laundry
wrapped in striped cottton towels
waiting the hiss of the heavy Sunbeam.

But in a yellow house at the corner,
by charm or circumstance
we both read Langston Hughes,
danced to Soul Train,
and learned to love the breath
in an iambic bass line,
and words that gleam and slither
with grace and punch.

Ms. Rita would have hated
my mama's kitchen.
Still, we're part of the same
family tree.


Author's Note:The prompts inspired the poem and a poetry writing exercise by Poet Laureate Rita Dove who suggested writing about your mother's kitchen, and to put in something green and something dead.


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