Oh, does this poem take me back to my childhood readings of Charlotte’s Web, by E. B. White! Are you familiar?
How the wondrous threads are woven . . .
WONDROUS Sarah Freligh I’m driving home from school when the radio talk turns to E. B. White, his birthday, and I exit the here and now of the freeway at rush hour, travel back into the past, where my mother is reading to my sister and me the part about Charlotte laying her eggs and dying, and though this is the fifth time Charlotte has died, my mother is crying again, and we’re laughing at her because we know nothing of loss and its sad math, how every subtraction is exponential, how each grief multiplies the one preceding it, how the author tried seventeen times to record the words She died alone without crying, seventeen takes and a short walk during which he called himself ridiculous, a grown man crying for a spider he’d spun out of the silk thread of invention— wondrous how those words would come back and make him cry, and, yes, wondrous to hear my mother’s voice ten years after the day she died—the catch, the rasp, the gathering up before she could say to us, I’m OK.
(My thanks to Sarah Freligh and E. B. White, via The Sun.)
The Gentle Nudge
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WEDNESDAY: Creatives’ Coffee (Zoom, 4:00-5:00PM Central, at this link)
THURSDAY: Poetry Pick-Me-Up (Zoom, 12:00-1:00PM Central, at this link)
So moving.
🕷🕸I’ve never read Charlotte’s Web but this has inspired me to…..
The words of this poem transported me too.....to a wound that never really heals, to a place where I remember all those I've loved and lost and the words fill me with sadness as I recall my special ones. Well done!