This week’s poem in the Catholic Poetry Room is by Karen D’Anselmi.
The House on Kingston Avenue
I had no curb appeal, no details to restore and they never could afford an addition or updates to my electrical system, or to tame rattling windows, soothe creaking floors. Yet I held them while they held their children: child rocking in the womb, child clinging at the breast; I held their favorite toys and the broken toy chest. I held all the weeping and hiding and building. Chubby-legged toddlers tumbled on my porch, constructed foreign cities of wooden blocks, then sprawled out in passionate late-night talks and escaped me by streetlight, the neighborhood torch. I was their shelter for every new stage: their nursery and castle, with prisoners of war— like a bureau with too much crammed in each drawer— I held coming-of-age pains and pains of old age. I hosted their failures and each grand endeavor, I was classroom, lab, thinktank and chapel Within me they pondered, prayed, and grappled - and wished for a home that would last forever.
Karen D’Anselmi writes from the Hudson Valley of New York. Many of her poems are about family, faith, and the mystery of life.
