Joanne Durham

Joanne Durham lives 50 feet from the ocean – less in high tides and hurricanes. She’s been writing poetry since she was five or six, in journals and on scraps of paper. 

Sunrise Sonnet for My Son

My son unloads the dishwasher first thing 

each morning. I think of him, four hundred 

miles away, as I stand on tiptoe to shelve 

last night’s wine glasses, stack my mother’s 

dessert plates, open the drawer beneath 

the oven just deep enough for all the pots 

and pans. He says for him, too, it’s a kind 

of meditation, this routine he and his wife 

have shaped into the contours of a shared 

life, fluted and spacious as the overflowing 

fruit bowl. This is what he possesses, not 

Lenox or Waterford, which neither of us owns, 

this man I raised, who hums as he sorts 

the silverware, noticing how each spoon shines. 

— Joanne Durham