Poetry Friday - The Collected Works of Susan Ramsey

My mom.
Just to avoid confusion, this is my mom. My mom, my mom, my mom.
And here's your shot of poetry for the week.

From New Poems from the Third Coast: An Anthology of Michigan Poets [Wayne State University Press, 2000]

Aftereffects of Bell's Palsy

Having a good and bad ear comes in handy.
My bad ear, victim of a surgeon's saw
screaming through bone to free a facial nerve
has lost the very highest range of sounds--
bats, telephones, sirens at a distance,
mosquitoes if they're male, small children whining,
regret, ambition's wheedlings, most tactful hints.
Banshees can keen on my ridgepole all night long
and, exhausted, watch me leave for work,
brisk and refreshed from sleeping good ear down.

My undiminished left ear can perceive
the beginnings of nightmare in a sleeping child
two rooms away behind a closed door, hear
the click of covert glances at a party,
the first drop on the roof of the first rain
of April, surmise the maiden name and color
of the eyes of the grandmother of the boy
my daughter sits thinking of, based on her breathing.
It can hear loneliness seven lamp posts down
the street, slamming like a screen door in the wind.

[Aftereffects was also included in Primavera, Volume 21 ]