Welcome to Poetry Friday, this week hosted by the lovely talented poet, Irene Latham HERE. Make sure you stop by to see what Irene has for us this week.
Wondering what Poetry Friday is? Get your questions answered HERE.
Because it’s the holidays and I recently traveled, I found myself looking at too many pictures of me and deleting many. I thought of being human and our personal relationship to the ever present and ever changing face we each carry around.
There I was, smiling in front of ancient buildings, at a Thanksgiving party with relatives, posing with my son in California. It’s surprised me how much I look like both my parents. It’s difficult to describe, but a variety of emotions welled up.
I discovered Carl Sandburg wrote a poem that resonated. It was in this book, and the poem was originally published in 1930:
PHIZZOG
by Carl Sandburg
This face you got,
This here phizzog you carry around,
You never picked it out for yourself, at all, at all--did
you?
This here phizzog--somebody handed it to you--am I
right?
Somebody said, "Here's yours, now go see what you can
do with it."
"No goods exchanged after
being taken away"--
This face you got.
This poem is sweet and funny. No goods exchanged, indeed!
Happy Holidays to everyone!! Hopefully the arctic weather doesn’t preclude my family from traveling four hours to see my husband’s sister for Christmas. We’ll all take our phizzogs with us for photos and celebrate Christmas and the end of 2022. We are lucky we have the freedom to do so. God bless the people of Ukraine.
