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July 24, 2019
 

#to my mother’s dementia #kaze no denwa

 
Lee Ann Roripaugh
Roripaugh reads "#to my mother's dementia   #kaze no denwa."

About This Poem

 

“‘#to my mother’s dementia  #kaze no denwa’ is part of a series of ‘wind phone’ (kaze no denwa) poems inspired by a disconnected phone booth in Japan where people have been pilgrimaging to speak to their dead following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. I was so moved by this story that I began to wonder what it might mean to write ‘wind phone’ poems—poems addressed to what is irrevocably lost and/or disappearing, what has been forcibly taken or erased, what one wishes to save even if/when it can’t be saved. These poems have become a vehicle for me to consider and mourn mass extinction, potential environmental collapse, as well as more personal losses and traumas—including witnessing my elderly parents’ minds and memories rapidly evanesce from dementia like glaciers in a too-warm sea. In this particular poem about my mother’s dementia, which has lessened the severity of her undiagnosed mental illness, I mourn the ways in which she was unable to parent me. At the same time, in the reversal of roles in which I parent and care for her now, I’ve discovered a hard-won tenderness which—in the way of all things about to disappear in a crucial tipping point—I feel exists at the precipice of violent loss.”
Lee Ann Roripaugh

 

Lee Ann Roripaugh is the author of five poetry collections, including Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50 (Milkweed, 2019). She is a professor of English at the University of South Dakota, where she is the editor-in-chief of South Dakota Review. The former South Dakota Poet Laureate, she lives in Vermillion, South Dakota.

more-at-poets

Poetry by Roripaugh

 

Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50

(Milkweed Editions, 2019)


"The Dream of Shoji" by Kimiko Hahn

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"For a Daughter Who Leaves" by Janice Mirikitani

read-more


"I Ask My Mother to Sing" by Li-Young Lee

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July Guest Editor: Paul Guest

 

Thanks to Paul Guest, author of Because Everything Is Terrible (Diode Editions, 2018), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read a Q&A with Guest about his curatorial approach this month and find out more about our guest editors for the year.

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