a POEM for your THOUGHTS

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American Life in Poetry: Column 529

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

 

People speak of “hearts and flowers” when they’re talking about poems with predictable sentimentality, but here’s an antidote to all those valentines, from Sally Bliumis-Dunn, who lives in New York. Her most recent book of poems isSecond Skin, Wind Publications, 2010. Heart  She has painted her lips hibiscus pink. The upper lip dips perfectly in the center like a Valentine heart. It makes sense to me— that the lips, the open ah of the mouth is shaped more like a heart than the actual human heart. I remember the first time I saw it— veined and shiny as the ooze of a snail— if this were what we had been taught to draw how differently we might have learned to love.