The Poetry Punishment
Beck, Ann

ANN: For thirty years I've wanted to talk about poetry but nobody wanted to listen. It had been thirty years since my college roommate and I stayed up late reading to each other our favorite poems by Robert Frost and thirty years since I took that modern poetry class where I was disappointed to find that the course was not about Frost but about Ezra Pound. Still it involved reading, writing, and talking about poetry and as it turned out it represented the last opportunity of this kind that would come my way until my children were born. Then after thirty years of silence on the subject, I began to take advantage of a captive audience and read and recited poetry to them until they matured enough to crawl away. A baby, I found, is unable to cover his little ears. Later on when they learned, well run, away from my poetry readings, I began to watch for opportunities to work poetry into ordinary conversation. For example, I would call one of the children aside and say something like, "Honey, I've been meaning to tell you that the road was a ribbon of moonlight looping the purple moor." Or "Dear, don't forget your lunch or that two roads diverged in a yellow wood." When they were young and innocent I could often quote a whole line, or even two, before they would throw down their crayons and flee. As they became more mobile, I became more creative. I whispered whole stanzas into the ears of sleeping babes and once I recited "The Highwayman" in its entirety through the keyhole of a locked bathroom door. Whether or not the child inside covered his ears I was too ashamed to ask. When the children were very small and I bathed all three of them in our big old-fashioned tub, they could hardly get away from me and my poetry, especially in the winter time when streaking wet and soapy down the unheated, bare-floored hall was a daunting means of escape. As they grew, so did my desperation until I developed what our family remembers as the poetry punishment. In the days of long car trips this was my secret weapon reserved for when things got too exciting in the back seat. The children learned the hard way that I could recite poetry all the way to El Paso and I'm not afraid to do it. Then came the dark day when my youngest child got his driver's license. I was even more anxious than most parents are when their children learned to drive. Where would he go? What time would he come home? Who would listen to my poetry now? One day not too long ago he drove all the way to Washington D.C. and he stayed there; he can do that, he's twenty-five years old. As to what you will come home, it will be around Christmas time. I'm just hoping that somewhere along the way he'll find himself stopping by woods on a snowy evening.