"Preparing for Residential Placement for My Disabled Daughter" by Jennifer Franklin

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March 10, 2023 

Preparing for Residential Placement for My Disabled Daughter

Jennifer Franklin

My life without you—I have already
seen it. Today, on the salt marsh. 
The red-winged blackbird perched 
in the tallest tree, sage green branches
falling over the water. She sat there
for a long time, doing nothing.
As she lifted up to fly, the slender branch
shook from the release of her weight.
When the bird departed, it seemed
the branch would shake forever
in the wind, bobbing up and down.
When it finally stopped moving,
the branch was diminished,
reaching out to the vast sky.

Copyright © 2023 by Jennifer Franklin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 10, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“I wrote this short poem during a twelve-day residency in Cape Cod. Because I raised my twenty-two-year-old disabled daughter by myself, this was the first time since graduate school that I had uninterrupted time to write. I woke up at dawn and sat on the deck with my dog and a cup of coffee, watching the abundance of birds—swans, osprey, ducks on the salt marsh. The simple red-winged blackbird provoked this poem. I hope [John] Keats’s negative capability comes across in this sonnet. That the beauty of the scene and the internal conflict of preparing for the hardest thing I will ever do in my life, for my daughter’s own good, comes through. Although she will still see me all the time, nothing will be the same, for either of us, again.”
—Jennifer Franklin

Jennifer Franklin is the author of If Some God Shakes Your House, forthcoming this month from Four Way Books. The recipient of grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts/City Corps and the Café Royal Cultural Foundation, she is the program director of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and a professor in the creative writing MFA program at Manhattanville College.

If Some God Shakes Your House
(Four Way Books, 2023) 

“The Pomegranate” by Eavan Boland
read more

“Plastic Cookie” by Cate Marvin
read more

Thanks to Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press, 2021), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or listen to a Q&A about Seuss’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year.
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