Teresa Cader

It Happened All the Time
October 9, 2014 Cader Teresa

It Happened All the Time

Kazimierz Czeslaw Cader, 1911-1912,  Buczkowice

 

Daylight shatters through the thatches where a bird might fall,

two days since she boiled eggs, baked black bread, scrubbed potatoes,

the orbit of hands and feet circumferential to her mind’s rutted track,

drawn curtain, its window onto wind-ravaged fields where hay withers,

one breath at a time, questions circle like wolves down from the mountains

to haunt the tattered sheep’s pen, barn stalls overflowing with udders

untouched since morning. Not old enough to talk, the child, his snagged

breath in the blankets like wool in the coats his father wove

at the factory up the road by the bend in the river. Or should I say my grand-

father wove—the child, my uncle no one ever mentioned, because It

happened all the time, as people say now. Everyone was used to it.

Who could grieve really over an empty cradle when it would fill soon?

Hopefully with a boy to weave the cloth, patch the roof, ward off the beasts

who might come as wolves or in two years as Austrian soldiers,

in twenty-seven years as German soldiers, next as Russian soldiers, a boy

who didn’t live to say no, might not have lived through it all anyway.

Teresa Cader’s fourth poetry collection, AT RISK, was selected by Mark Doty for the 2023 Richard Snyder Memorial Book Prize and will be published by Ashland Poetry Press in October 2024. Her other books include: History of Hurricanes (Northwestern, 2009), selected as a “Must Read” book by the Massachusetts Center for the Book; The Paper Wasp (Northwestern, 1998); and Guests (1990), winner of The Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Prize Poetry Prize and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has been awarded two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and multiple honors and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, MacDowell, and Bread Loaf. Her poems have appeared in The AtlanticSlatePlumePoetryHarvard ReviewOn the SeawallAGNIPloughsharesHarvard Magazine, and many other venues. Her work has been translated into Icelandic and Polish.