The Sound of Sugar....Gary Dop

Have You Heard The One About

the madwoman who gave birth without screaming

till she held her child? She wailed:

He’s going to die. He’s going to die. And he did

eighty-four years later in a fishing village where he retired

with his wife and their latest Shih Tzu, Dreamy.

I know there’s no satisfying punch line, no

little joke about mom’s prediction, and nothing

to barb with the sanity of a mother’s pain—

nothing, that is, till you examine

your satisfied sigh when you heard that the baby

lived. Distracted, you pranced past the little truth—

every joke’s companion—the madwoman

was right: The boy died. The crazy mother

mourned the death to come, the death

of the old man in the infant, the death we forget

in favor of what we call sanity, that flimsy gift

of some other madwoman who birthed

the rest of us and the jokes we bear.

About the Poet:

Gary Dop teaches writing at Randolph College on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. His essays have aired on All Things Considered, and his poems have appeared recently in Prairie Schooner, Agni, Rattle, New Letters, among others. His first collection of poems, Father, Child, Water, was just released from Red Hen Press.

About the Sound of Sugar:
We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. This an open invitation to all contributors from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to hear it.