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American Life in Poetry: Column 522
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
Poetry is a good way to capture epiphanies, and this poem by Penny Harter does just that. Harter lives and teaches in New Jersey. In the Dark
At bedtime, my grandson’s breath
rasps in and out of fragile lungs.
Holding the nebulizer mask
over his nose and mouth,
I rock him on my lap and hum
a lullaby to comfort him.
The nebulizer hisses as steroids
stream into his struggling chest,
and suddenly he also starts to hum,
his infant voice rising and falling
on the same few notes—some hymn
he must have learned while in the womb
or carried here from where he was before—
a kind of plainsong, holy and hypnotic
in the dark.
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