Poet of the Month

Elizabeth Thomas
Elizabeth Thomas, whose most recent collection is From the Front of the Classroom, is founder of UpWords Poetry, a company promoting programs for young writers and educators. She was a leader of the CT National Youth Poetry Slam Team in 2008, as well as two others, including the U.S. team that traveled to Sweden in 1998. She has been poet in residence at schools in Windsor, New Haven, Torrington, Hartford, and Suffield, among others. The following poem is from her most recent collection:

ABUNDANCE
for Kiana Rose Andle

The chair is as old as my son –
brown wood, still sturdy after all these years.
Gold painted basket of eggs and feathers
even now overflows.
And somewhere along the seat,
teeth marks notch the surface.
It was the nicest piece of furniture we owned
and we dragged it
from apartment to apartment,
state to state.
When I was pregnant
his future grandmother offered it, saying
“Might as well be comfortable
while we wait.”
And it became our special place
for songs and fairy tales.

The chair now gathers dust
in this old room.
I see my son
learning to pull himself up
and he is teething.
I wail when he uses the rocker for both.
“Time out! Time out!
Look what you’ve done to my chair!”
I have no appreciation
that all these years later
I would rock,
seek out the marks,
run my finger across them –
like someone blind
needing to remember.

Further Reading: Elizabeth Thomas, From the Front of the Classroom, in our library.

Content developed by local resident and poet Leland Jamieson