Finding Home: Other Voices

I'm pleased to launch Finding Home: Other Voices, a platform for guest writers to ponder the question: What is home?

To kick off this Thursday series, I know you'll enjoy the work of poet, playwright and author Pamela Hobart Carter.

RAISED AND RAZED 

Only house our children knew, where they were raised,

(only children raised in our old house)—waits to be razed.

Mirror-mantel with mottled green tile will grace

another house. Men will salvage and scavenge

her wood, her radiators. Men will flatten

her asbestos siding, her lath, her plaster.

Men will dig where Edna has stood one hundred

and eleven years. I demark the raising

of my children, their chalk hopscotch on front walk,

their slides in shorts down her grass as if on sleds

in snow, with orange cones. Men cannot raze games:

their hide-and-seek, their chase, their splendid stair-ball

invented for her carpeted risers, nor

careenings on her bannister. They cannot

erase images, the house we added to—

dark built-ins for our books, pale green tiled shower,

closets where she had few, fresh elegant paint,

and a garden we raised in borroweds and blues.

Whetherbe built two yellow quartermasters,

one, at his fort, and ours, on the quiet street.

Ours shimmied from her central axis, windows

skipped a beat, yardstick slipped: aging dowager,

misapplied lipstick sitting crooked across

her smile, unphased. We sold her to be razed.

Seattle resident Pamela Hobart Carter grew up in Montreal, Quebec. A geologist by training, Carter has taught everything from preschool to science pedagogy. She practices timed writing with two Seattle groups. Recently Carter began to wield poetry for the purpose of eliminating hunger.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Pamela-Hobart-Carter/e/B006JVX768  

 

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