My Son Offers His Version of the Story

by Judith Sornberger

for Jamer

The most comforting sound
he remembers from childhood
was me tapping out poems
in the room next to the one
he shared with his brother,
a lullaby of rhythmic clicking,
one more bedtime story
delivering him to his dreams.

The story of his secretary mom
and lawyer father didn’t have
a happy ending, but he swears
he never knew that we were poor,
remembers filling suppers,
clean and mended jeans for school,
and a Michael Jackson birthday party.

I’d bought the cornflower blue,
self-correcting Smith Corona
with a tax refund, and after
I’d spent the day answering phones
and typing memos, after washing
dinner dishes and tucking in my boys,
I sat before the typewriter that
transformed fear and worry into words,
magically erasing each small error.

Judith Sornberger is the author of four full-length poetry collections: Angel Chimes: Poems of Advent and Christmas (forthcoming from Shanti Arts, 2020), I Call to You from Time (Wipf & Stock, 2019), Practicing the World (CavanKerry, 2018), and Open Heart (Calyx Books)—and five chapbooks. Her prose memoir The Accidental Pilgrim: Finding God and His Mother in Tuscany is from Shanti Arts. She is professor emerita of Mansfield University, where she taught English and Women’s Studies.