Ithaca

I’ve been blessed
with a few gusts of wind,
a few loves
to wave goodbye to.
I still think of mother’s kitchen,
sorry for tantrums
of way back when. No frost
lodged in me then. In those days
snow spread through town
like an epidemic: how archival
the blankness seemed.
If you flew above
the shell of the old house
it was nothing really:
there was no story
to our little ranch house,
so you couldn’t hear a thing.

Credit

Copyright @ 2014 by Ira Sadoff. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on July 14, 2014.

About this Poem

“‘Ithaca’ fuses the contemporary Ithaca with the mythic Ithaca. I think of the island of Ithaca and at the same time the isolation I felt growing up. Unlike Homer’s Odyssey, this speaker’s experience has not been redeemed by story. This Ithaca’s suburban, full of replicate houses, cold, anonymous: it’s no place to return to.”

—Ira Sadoff