For your reading: “Sunday Morning” by Corrine Hales
Sunday Morning by Corrine Hales
Crowded around the glowing open mouth
Of the electric oven, the children
Pull on clothes and eat brown-sugared oatmeal.
The broiler strains, buzzing to keep up
500 degrees, and the mother
Is already scrubbing at a dark streak
On the kitchen wall. Last night she’d been
Ironing shirts and trying her best to explain
Something important to the children
When the old mother cat’s surviving
Two kittens’ insistent squealing and scrambling
Out of their cardboard box began
To get to her. The baby screamed every time
The oldest girl set him on the cold floor
While she carried a kitten back to its place
Near the stove, and the mother cat kept reaching
For the butter dish on the table. Twice, the woman
Stopped talking and set her iron down to swat
A quick kitten away from the dangling cord,
And she saw that one of the boys had begun to feed
Margarine to his favorite by the fingerful.
When it finally jumped from his lap and squatted
To piss on a pale man’s shirt dropped below
Her inroning board, the woman calmly stopped, unplugged
Her iron, picked up the gray kitten with one hand
And threw it, as if it were a housefly, hard
And straight at the yellow flowered wall
Across the room. It hit, cracked, and seemed to slide
Into a heap on the floor, leaving an od silence
In the house. They all stood still
Staring at the thing, until one child,
The middle boy, walked slowly out of the room
And down the hall without looking
At his mother or what she’d done. The others followed
And by morning everything was back to normal
Except for the mother standing there scrubbing.
This is a wonderful example of a poem building tension subtly. It’s amazing, really. Even before knowing what’s coming, you start to feel something’s amiss. It’s a believable situation of an overworked woman snapping. And as one of the kids… what, really, could you do? Be extra nice to cats in the future maybe… but really, a tremendous poem about a horrible event.