Some Poems — Anne Harding Woodworth

The Miniaturist, 1828
Sarah Goodridge (1788-1853)

When she heard his wife had died,
she painted a miniature self-breast,
with which he was surely familiar—

he whose name Daniel Webster had burst out
huge into the public consciousness.
He did not ask her to join him in the forum.

She was a mere painter of large things
made small, not so much insignificant,
as causing the naked eye to squint.

She continued to live off the minuscule,
the pocketable, in her unimportant way,
but no customer gave her workspace the shiver
he had brought about among her paints.

Life without ecstasy left her woeful.
He remarried. Someone else. She was certain
he would destroy the miniature, the two baby birds,

craning, eager in their nest. But history revealed
he’d locked it in a drawer, as if
the quick click of a key could keep a secret.

Rommel’s Afrikakorps

At Fort Riley the POWs did odd jobs
at the tank commander’s house.
They put down their rakes

and each in turn picked up the child,
held him delicately singing German lullabies
as if they were chorales.

His grandmother swatted a broom across their knees,
screaming at them to leave the boy alone,
damned Nazi Krauts, or she would kill them.

And so Germany was vanquished.

The prisoners dissolved into other places
in a time of movement all over the world.
And in a ’38 Plymouth

the boy’s father took the family
from Kansas to a town in Michigan,
where they built a bungalow on Harmon Street,

and the boy stood in a bay window there,
felt the sun across his face drawing him
out into the front seat of the Plymouth,

Here are some links to other poems by Anne Harding Woodworth.

Selections from Anne's chapbook, The Last Gun. These won the 2015-2016 COG Poetry Award out of Cogswell College. A. Van Jordan, judge. See cogzine.com

Here's a video of Anne reading at the Guilford Poetry Guild, April 14, 2016

Other poems:

“Vacuum Cleaner”

“Flyover”
“Accident on the Red Line Remembered”
“Asunder”
"Driving into London"
"Dessert is not the End"
"Leaving in a Beechcraft"
"Mysteries of the Universe will be Solved Starting Next Wednesday"
"Quantum"
"Stuart Among the Nightingales"