"Saudade" by John Freeman

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend October 10, 2017   Saudade   John Freeman

means nostalgia, I'm told, but also nostalgia for what never was. Isn't it the same thing? At a café in Rio flies wreathe my glass.   How you would have loved this: the waiter sweating his knit shirt dark. Children loping, in tiny suits or long shorts, dragging toys and towels to the beach. We talk,   or I talk, and imagine your answer, the heat clouding our view. Here, again, grief fashioned in its cruelest translation: my imagined you is all I have left of you.            Copyright © 2017 John Freeman. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "Every time I leave the country, I think about the fact that my mother never did. A few years ago I sat down at a café in Rio around that hour when people begin walking across the avenues back to streetcars to go home. It occurred to me the feeling I was having while sitting there—wishing my mother had lived to have had this experience with me—was the perfect expression of saudade, so I wrote the poem." —John Freeman   John Freeman is the author of Maps, published this month by Copper Canyon Press. He teaches writing at The New School and is an Artist-in-Residence at New York University. Poetry by Freeman   Maps (Copper Canyon Press, 2017) "My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer" by Mark Strand "Hustlers with Bad Timing" by D. A. Powell "The Sky Over My Mother's House" by Jaime Manrique Poem-a-Day   If you value Poem-a-Day, please consider a monthly donation or one-time gift to help make it possible. Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today's poets each weekday morning. The free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. Thank you! Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038