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Joe Lehman

"God Made Me" [by David Lehman]

Joe age 9God Made Me

        Returning from a walk across the Dug Road bridge and into the Ludlowville

woods, Joe carried some violets we had picked. An old man with a handsome 

Labrador going in the opposite direction asked, “Are they for Easter?” “No,” Joe said. 

“For Passover.” Joe was nearly four, I nearly thirty-nine.

        In May of that year, 1987, Joe and I approached the Dug Road bridge, and there

was no one in our path. Joe whispered: “Go quietly over the bridge, so you don’t wake

up the geese.” The next day I repeated his words to him when we came to the place.

He immediately started singing. “Why?” “Because the geese are awake,” he said.

        The day we went to the bird sanctuary at Sapsucker Woods, Joe made up a song,

“Fish Birds on the Sea,” to the tune of the verse introducing “Jingle Bells”: “Dashing

through the snow.” That night I asked him to tell me a story. “Okay,” he said. “Once

upon a time, there was a little boy named Daddy.

        Then, out of the blue, “‘God made me,” he said.


How did this poem begin for you?

I seldom leave the house without a little notebook tucked into my jacket pocket or the back pocket of my trousers. Ideas, titles for poems I’d like to write, memories, overheard phrases, quotes, dreams, jests, anecdotes, lists of books I want to read, even mundane lists of errands that need doing may find their way into the notebook. With defunct notebooks, I can be careless. All the better when a lost notebook turns up and on one of its pages a cryptic phrase from 1987 summons a delightful memory. My son Joe made some arresting statements that year, and he even wrote (or dictated to me) a poem a day for several weeks. A phrase about the Dug Road bridge reminded me of walks he and I took that spring. That’s how I came to write “God Made Me.”

David Lehman is a poet and professional writer. He edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry. His recent books of poems include The Morning Line and Poems in the Manner Of.

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"Lively and affectionate" Publishers Weekly

Radio

I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark


from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman

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