Ed Madden
Something to Declare
11 July 2018
after William Stafford
Trump is overseas this week, all bluster and lies,
but we’re reading William Stafford in a chilly classroom
and trying to write about where we live now, and how.
Important people gather around a big table,
and we sit at our little desks. Sachi talks about what it means
to declare something when you cross a border.
Back home, I know my cat is dying. She’ll amble
stiffly to the door when I return, her blind eyes
wide and bright with what she can’t see.
They say that history is going on somewhere.
Zoe describes her story as a scrap of paper swept
by the wind, litter snagged in a tree.
This is only a little report from a summer arts camp,
where Makenna and Maya and Eva and Micah are writing
about their small, rich lives. We’re here. You can find us here.
Ed Madden is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Ark (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016), a memoir in verse about caring for his father in his last months of living with cancer; and the chapbook, So they can sing, winner of the 2016 Robin Becker Poetry Prize from Seven Kitchens Press. Madden is the director of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC.
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