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Reading

"Radiator"

American Life in Poetry: Column 052
By Ted Kooser
U.S. poet laureate
What a marvelous gift is the imagination, and each of us gets one at birth, free of charge and ready to start up, get on, and ride away. Can there be anything quite so homely and ordinary as a steam radiator? And yet, here, Connie Wanek, of Duluth, Minnesota, nudges one into play.
This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Radiator
Mittens are drying on the radiator,
boots nearby, one on its side.
Like some monstrous segmented insect
the radiator elongates under the window.

Or it is a beast with many shoulders
domesticated in the Ice Age.
How many years it takes
to move from room to room!

Some cage their radiators
but this is unnecessary
as they have little desire to escape.

Like turtles they are quite self-contained.
If they seem sad, it is only the same sadness
we all feel, unlovely, growing slowly cold.

Reprinted from “Bonfire,” New Rivers Press, 1997, by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 1997 by Connie Wanek. Her most recent book is “Hartley Field,” from Holy Cow! Press.

Reading

I don’t know what to say about this.

The Dutch Labour Party has put forward a plan that would “recover” part of the cost of educating women who opt to stay home with their children. Labor Party Deputy Chairwoman Sharon Dijksma had this to say:

“A highly-educated woman who chooses to stay at home and not to work — that is destruction of capital. If you receive the benefit of an expensive education at the cost of society, you should not be allowed to throw away that knowledge unpunished.”

Here is the full story.

Reading

"If you can’t breathe, you can’t help anybody."

CHICAGO (AP) — Researchers say they’ve shown for the first time that treating a mother’s depression can help prevent depression and anxiety disorders in her child …

Depression runs in families and has a strong genetic component, but environmental factors can trigger it. The study results indicate that for children of depressed mothers, that trigger is sometimes their mothers’ illness acting up, said lead author Myrna Weissman, a researcher at Columbia University and New York Psychiatric Institute.

Effective treatment for mothers could mean their children might avoid the need for prescription antidepressants, the researchers said.

“Depressed parents should be treated vigorously. It’s a two-fer — the impact is not only on them but it’s also on their children,” Weissman said.

… The results are “very plausible and very convincing and very useful,” said Dr. Nada Stotland, vice president of the American Psychiatric Association and a psychiatry professor at Rush Medical College in Chicago.

“Our society gives a lot of lip service to how important mothers are but in fact we don’t always appreciate just how profound their effects on their children are,” said Stotland, who was not involved in the study.

While mothers often tend to put their own needs last, this research “is a good argument for them to take care of themselves first,” she said. “It’s a little like putting your own oxygen mask on first on the airplane. If you can’t breathe, you can’t help anybody.”

Here is the article in full.