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.
Welcome to Poetry Moment. I’m Marjorie Maddox.
“Give sorrow words," the character Malcolm counsels MacDuff in Shakespeare’s play MacBeth. But how do you put into words the deep inconsolable grief of losing a child, a loss that taints everything you see and do? Today’s poem, “Ultrasound: Your Room," is one in a series of sonnets. In the poem, George David Clark gives voice to paralyzing heartbreak. And yet, by sharing with us his son’s empty room, he also allows us to name our sorrows.
George David Clark is the author of Reveille (University of Arkansas Press), winner of the Miller Williams Prize, and Newly Not Eternal (LSU Press). He is co-editor, with Lew Klatt, of Playing with Fire: Christian Poets Reflect on Faith and Practice, forthcoming from Baylor this winter. Since 2011, David has edited the journal, 32 Poems. He teaches creative writing as an associate professor at Washington & Jefferson College and lives in Canonsburg, PA.
As a country, we speak the names of our lost loved ones as a form of honor and remembrance. This may also be true when privately mourning a child. Today’s poet “marks the vacuum with a few more decibels”—even if it makes the room more empty. We, too, can say our loved ones’ names into the air, hold onto the syllables that we first gave them.
If there is a room of grief that we keep closed, perhaps today’s poem may allow us to enter it.
Here’s “Ultrasound: Your Room” by George David Clark.
Ultrasound: Your Room
I spill your name
into the empty room
and make the place more
empty still: the chair’s
clean seat adopts
a misanthropic air
that mocks the bureau’s
sympathetic bloom.
I watch the wooden crib
as it’s consumed
by morning, bar by bar,
till crying downstairs
letsme know
how far this solitary
staring has erased
me inthe gloom.
Your healthy twin
is hungry, tired, parched
and wet, or simply
needing to be held,
and yet I still don’t move.
I feel compelled
to tell the room
it’s missing you, to mark
the vacuum with a few
more decibels
of Henry, Henry,
Henry Thomas Clark.
This poem was first published inThe Hopkins Review 11.3, 2018 and was collected in Newly Not Eternal (LSU, 2024).
That was “Ultrasound: Your Room” by George David Clark. Thanks for listening.
Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox, Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can view more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
