WEBVTT

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We'll go back to the book
and read you the first poem.

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Oh, it's not the first poem.

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I want to read you coming home.

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This is a poem I
wrote for my mother.

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My sister said, that she has
just now understood this poem.

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She just went away
to college this year.

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She said she never understood
the ending of the poem

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until this year when
she had to leave home.

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My father was a longshoreman.

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I probably should mention that.

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As usual, I was desperate.

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I went through your
house as if I owned it.

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I said, I need this and this.

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But contrary to all I know
of you, you did not answer.

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Only looked after me.

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I've never seen the
house so empty, mother.

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Even the rugs felt it
how little they covered.

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And what have you
done with the plants?

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How thankfully we thought
they're green replaced us.

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You were keeping
something like a light.

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I had seen it before, a
place you'd never been

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or never came back from.

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It was a special way your eyes
looked out over the water.

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Whitecaps lifted the bay.

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And you said, he
should be here by now.

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Oh, he always came back.

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The drinking, the fishing at
night, all the ruthless ships

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he unloaded.

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That was the miracle
of our lives.

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Even now, he won't stay out
of what I have to say to you.

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But they worry me.

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Those boxes of clothes
I left in your basement,

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sometimes I think of
home as a storehouse.

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The more we leave
behind, the less you say.

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The last time I
couldn't take anything.

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So I'm always coming back
like tonight in a temper

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brushing the azaleas
on the doorstep what

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did you mean by it?

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This tenderness that
is a whip a longing.

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I think I was feeling in there.

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How impossible it is to pay
anything back to your parents.

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I forgot that one notebook.

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