2002 Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize Finalist

On the Thanksgiving Morning My Grandson’s Born      by Wendell Hawken

I’ve kept the clothes no body fits,
33 1/3 records no machine can play,
boxes full of god-knows-what from other lives.
Of course I’ll put today’s newspaper up there
with his mother’s one armed teddy bear,
finger paintings I had framed, the gerbil cage
and goldfish bowls, the fake fur purse
she held against her cheek for years.
He can read about the world when he came in:
the coffee shop in Beijing’s Forbidden City,
the canceled probe to Pluto,
1607 map that’s better than  ceramic shards,
stains of human habitation, for finding what has vanished
on a bluff above the Kennebec in Maine.
I’ll put this paper in the chest beside the box
that holds my cousin Sally’s wedding dress
that came to me when Sally’s mother died.
It took me years to pull the light bulb by its string
and lift that dress box lid
on the lace gone limp and yellow
up there under ceiling panels stained with rain,
where you find your way by feel
around the stuff suspended there above our daily lives,
where air and light seep in
and goldfish swim in empty bowls
and you can hear the gerbils creak their wheel
at night, especially in the wind, while downstairs
over the refrigerator sit the empty canning jars.

Wendell Hawken

Wendell Hawken is a retired marketing executive living on a farm at the mouth of the Shennandoah Valley, where and her husband raise Hereford cattle. She wrote her first poem—an ode to her uterus—in 1991 lying in bed recovering from a hysterectomy. Her chapbook, Mother Tongue, was published by Argonne House Press. She has two children and one grandchild, Carter McKinstry White, who was born Thanksgiving day 2000.