Bess by Linda Pastan
I love this poem (which I found in Garrison’ Keillor’s Good Poems), partly because it is in reference to one of my favorite poems.
Bess
By Linda Pastan
When Bess, the landlord’s black-eyed
daughter, waited for her highwayman
in the poem I learned by breathless
heart at twelve, it occurred to me
for the first time that my mild-eyed
mother Bess might have a life
all her own—a secret past
I couldn’t enter, except in dreams.
That single sigh of a syllable
has passed like a keepsake
to this newest child, wrapped now
in the silence of sleep.
And in the dream I enter,
I could be holding my infant mother
in my arms: the same wide cheekbones,
the name indelible as a birthmark.
