{"id":4306,"date":"2023-04-27T15:37:31","date_gmt":"2023-04-27T19:37:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.holdsuponhappiness.com\/?p=4306"},"modified":"2023-04-27T15:37:32","modified_gmt":"2023-04-27T19:37:32","slug":"a-poem-for-a-thursday-223","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.holdsuponhappiness.com\/index.php\/2023\/04\/27\/a-poem-for-a-thursday-223\/","title":{"rendered":"A Poem for a Thursday #223"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"\"
Photo by Yannick Pulver<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Lawrence Raab was born in Pittsfield, MA and is the author of numerous collections of poetry. He has been a professor of poetry at Williams College since 1976. I found this poem in a collection called Good Poems: Selected and Introduced by Garrison Keillor. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
I liked rainy days\nwhen you didn't have to go outside and play.\nAt night I'd tell my sister\nthere were snakes under her bed.\nWhen I mowed the lawn I imagined being famous\nCautious and stubborn, unwilling to fail,\nI knew for certain what I didn't want to know.\n\nI hated to dance, I hated baseball,\nand collected airplane cards instead.\nI learned to laugh at jokes I didn't get.\nThe death of Christ moved me,\nbut only at the end of Ben-Hur<\/em>.\nI thought Henry Mancini was a great composer.\n\nMy secret desire was to own a collie\nwho would walk with me in the woods\nWhen the leaves were falling\nand I was thinking about writing the stories \nthat would make me famous.\n\nSullen, overweight,melancholy,\nwriters didn't have to be good at sports.\nThey stayed inside for long periods of time.\nThey often wore glasses. But strangers\nwere moved by what they accomplished\nand wrote them letters. One day\n\none of those strangers would introduce\nherself to me, and then\nthe life I'd never been able to foresee\nwould begin, and everything \nbefore I became myself would appear\nnecessary to the rest of the story. \n\nMy Life Before I Knew It\nLawrence Raab<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lawrence Raab was born in Pittsfield, MA and is the author of numerous collections of poetry. He has been a professor of poetry at Williams College since 1976. I found this poem in a collection called Good Poems: Selected and Introduced by Garrison Keillor. I liked rainy days when you didn’t have to go outside and play. At night I’d tell my sister there were snakes under her bed. When I mowed the lawn I imagined being famous Cautious and stubborn, unwilling to fail, I knew for certain what I didn’t want to know. I hated to dance, I hated baseball, and collected airplane cards instead. I learned to laugh at jokes I didn’t get. The death of Christ moved me, but only at the end of Ben-Hur. I thought Henry Mancini was a great composer. My secret desire was to own a collie who would walk with me in the woods When the leaves were falling and I was thinking about writing the stories that would make me famous. Sullen, overweight,melancholy, writers didn’t have to be good at sports. They stayed inside for long periods of time. They often wore glasses. But strangers were moved by what they accomplished and wrote them letters. One day one of those strangers would introduce herself to me, and then the life I’d never been able to foresee would begin, and everything before I became myself would appear necessary to the rest of the story. My Life Before I Knew It Lawrence Raab<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4307,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poem-for-a-thursday"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holdsuponhappiness.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holdsuponhappiness.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holdsuponhappiness.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holdsuponhappiness.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holdsuponhappiness.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4306"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.holdsuponhappiness.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4308,"href":"https:\/\/www.holdsuponhappiness.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4306\/revisions\/4308"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holdsuponhappiness.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holdsuponhappiness.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holdsuponhappiness.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holdsuponhappiness.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}