[New-Poetry] Simic on Keillor's The Writer's Almanac

[Anny Ballardini]

 Prodigy

by Charles Simic<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,cac6,dv,f2bb,bgho,3hrs,fxvj>

I grew up bent over
a chessboard.

I loved the word endgame.

All my cousins looked worried.

It was a small house
near a Roman graveyard.
Planes and tanks
shook its windowpanes.

A retired professor of astronomy
taught me how to play.

That must have been in 1944.

In the set we were using,
the paint had almost chipped off
the black pieces.

The white King was missing
and had to be substituted for.

I'm told but do not believe
that that summer I witnessed
men hung from telephone poles.

I remember my mother
blindfolding me a lot.
She had a way of tucking my head
suddenly under her overcoat.

In chess, too, the professor told me,
the masters play blindfolded,
the great ones on several boards
at the same time.


 "Prodigy" by Charles Simic from *Charles Simic: Selected Early Poems*. (c)
George Braziller, 2000. Reprinted with permission (buy
now<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,cac6,dv,aqgq,ikew,3hrs,fxvj>)



-- 
Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing
star!
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