Poem-A-Day: On. On. Stop. Stop. by Saskia Hamilton

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On. On. Stop. Stop. by Saskia Hamilton   In the old recording of the birthday party, the voices of the living and the dead instruct twelve absent friends on the reliable luxury of gratitude. The celebrated one hands out presents. The dead dog barks once. We take one another's hands and follow their lead, past the garden wall, out to the land still stripped by winter. Those gone do not usurp those here. We keep the warning close, the timbre of their voices mingling with the sounds of traffic going much faster to its destinations. Is it the size or the scale of the past on the small reels of the cassette? Someone gives her a new pot, which, she exclaims, is too great a luxury for her. Someone's missing who can convert the currencies. The old treasure was dropped in the furrows to await spring, with rings and pennies and florins and other denominations from those pockets and fingers. Copyright © 2013 by Saskia Hamilton. Used with permission of the author. About this Poem:   "I was cleaning out some old boxes and found a cassette tape labeled with my grandmother's name and a date, but had no idea what it was. I slipped it into the machine and switched it on, and heard what was a recording of her eightieth birthday party, during which she both gave and received presents--and there, suddenly present, voices of the living and the dead filled the room, all of us in a simultaneous moment, my relatives in a house in the Dutch countryside in 1988, amidst the noise of city traffic in 2012. The title is borrowed from one of Samuel Beckett's radio plays, Embers (with its first injunction to turn the radio on)." Saskia Hamilton Poetry by Hamilton Divide These   Poem-A-Day launched in 2006 and features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.   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. March 1, 2013 Saskia Hamilton is the author of two books of poems, Divide These (Graywolf Press, 2005) and As for Dream (Graywolf Press, 2001). Hamilton is the editor of The Letters of Robert Lowell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). She teaches at Barnard College. Related Poems Sojourn by Catherine Barnett  Epilogue by Robert Lowell One Art by Elizabeth Bishop

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