Finding Home: Other Voices

I'm pleased to launch Finding Home: Other Voices, a platform for guest writers to ponder the question: What is home?

To kick off this Thursday series, I know you'll enjoy the work of poet, playwright and author Pamela Hobart Carter.


RAISED AND RAZED 
Only house our children knew, where they were raised,(only children raised in our old house)—waits to be razed.Mirror-mantel with mottled green tile will graceanother house. Men will salvage and scavenge her wood, her radiators. Men will flatten her asbestos siding, her lath, her plaster. Men will dig where Edna has stood one hundred and eleven years. I demark the raising of my children, their chalk hopscotch on front walk, their slides in shorts down her grass as if on sleds in snow, with orange cones. Men cannot raze games: their hide-and-seek, their chase, their splendid stair-ball invented for her carpeted risers, nor careenings on her bannister. They cannot erase images, the house we added to—dark built-ins for our books, pale green tiled shower, closets where she had few, fresh elegant paint, and a garden we raised in borroweds and blues. Whetherbe built two yellow quartermasters,one, at his fort, and ours, on the quiet street.Ours shimmied from her central axis, windows skipped a beat, yardstick slipped: aging dowager, misapplied lipstick sitting crooked across her smile, unphased. We sold her to be razed.
Seattle resident Pamela Hobart Carter grew up in Montreal, Quebec. A geologist by training, Carter has taught everything from preschool to science pedagogy. She practices timed writing with two Seattle groups. Recently Carter began to wield poetry for the purpose of eliminating hunger. http://www.amazon.com/Pamela-Hobart-Carter/e/B006JVX768   Don't want to miss a single post? Get them delivered by entering your email in the box in the lower right column.
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Published on March 12, 2015 09:04
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