This is poetry moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
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Welcome to Poetry Moment.
We’re nearing the end of 2024. Some count blessings: shared moments with family and friends, personal successes, unexpected pleasures. For others, memories swing from gratitude to deep grief, and loss overwhelms. In today’s poem, “Counting My Losses,” Jacqueline Osherow mourns the death of loved ones to natural causes, to disease, and, tragically, to suicide.
Jacqueline Osherow was born in Philadelphia in 1956 and was educated, though high school, in Philadelphia public schools, graduating from Northeast High School in 1974. She is the author of nine collections of poetry, most recently Divine Ratios (LSU Press, 2023). She’s received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill Foundation, the NEA, and the Witter Bynner Prize, among others. Her poems have appeared in many magazines, journals and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, APR, Best American Poetry, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. Currently, she’s Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah.
Preparing for the New Year includes lists: places to go, people to see, chores to accomplish, goals to meet. The catalog in today’s poem, however, is not a to-do list. It is, instead, a lament, perhaps similar to one that you, too, have wailed in the dead of night.
Jacqueline Osherow’s poem, “Counting My Losses,” begins with an allusion to the Unetanneh Tokef prayer that, she explains, “Jewish readers who attend services on the High Holidays will recognize.”
Here’s “Counting My Losses” by Jacqueline Osherow
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One by fire,
four at will
(one who’d hang,
one who’d pull
the plug on his
own ventilator;
one who’d hit
the crowded water
just beneath
the Golden Gate;
one who learned
to operate
a shotgun
bought an hour past)
one too slowly,
one too fast,
two from age
(one broken hip;
one too weak
to wake from sleep);
who who’d slip
(a cliff-side path),
one surgery’s
botched aftermath,
one who wept,
one who prayed
one heart, alas,
ineptly made
one who moved
a single thumb;
(ALS
her conundrum
brain intact
while body withers),
cancer of course
for all the others.
—
From My Lookalike at the Krishna Temple (LSU Press, 2019)
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That was “Counting My Losses” by Jacqueline Osherow
If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, please text, chat, or call 988 to directly access the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
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Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
