When I was 19, I gave my mother a book of poetry. Even then, it seemed to me that poetry was the best thing I could offer my loved ones. It was a book academics & serious poets would dismiss with (at best) a shake of the head, but I knew she would like it. And at 19? I did too. 🙂

Sometimes, the things we love when we are young don’t last well. Weird glasses, flat-ironed hair, low-rider jeans and more. But other things weather time gracefully, even if they show all the lines of their journey. There are short poems in this book that still move me. While some are steeped in sentiment, others have the spare clarity of American haiku.

So today’s poem is from that book of my mother’s, given on a Mother’s Day long ago and far away. Here is an untitled poem from Joan Walsh Anglund’s A Cup of Sun:

Just outside my wisdom

are words that would answer everything.