By: Emily Shwake

It turns out the poets love their Aunties just as much as your nieces and nephews love you. And Joyce Sutphen (1949), a contemporary poet who has received countless awards for her poetry, clearly loved hers.

In First Words, her anthology that memoirs her family life, “The Aunts” is a reflection of how her aunts bond together, gently steer the family, and take charge at moments of passing. Her aunts are a source of comfort and nostalgia that persists, even after Sutphen leaves the family farm.

We’d like to think Joyce Sutphen celebrates Auntie’s Day with “The Aunts”:

The Aunts
By: Joyce Sutphen

I like it when they get together
and talk in voices that sound
like apple trees and grape vines,

and some of them wear hats
and go to Arizona in the winter,
and they all like to play cards.

They will always be the ones
who say “It is time to go now,”
even as we linger at the door,

or stand by the waiting cars, they
remember someone—an uncle we
never knew—and sigh, all

of them together, like wind
in the oak trees behind the farm
where they grew up—a place

I remember—especially
the hen house and the soft
clucking that filled the sunlit yard.


Photo: Poetry Foundation
Published: July 13, 2015