Maria Mazziotti Gillan
When I Was Still Young
I remember getting up at 3 or 4 in the morning,
going down to my kitchen
and looking out the window at my neighbor’s house
or at the moon
or at the utter darkness.
That was when I could still get out of bed by myself
and not need my aide to haul me out of bed like a sack of potatoes.
I used to get up in the middle of the night and read and write.
Sometimes, when I’m in the little twin bed
in the corner of my family room where I sleep now,
I forget that I can’t get myself out of bed
and I imagine getting up and going to the kitchen
and writing poems in a notebook.
I was still in my 30s,
my children asleep upstairs in their beds,
my husband asleep in our bed,
and I downstairs in the kitchen,
those hours alone when no one needed me.
I was so relaxed and happy,
quiet wrapped all around me, dreaming
and reading those wonderful poets who kept me company:
Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, May Sarton.
Those women taught me how to open doors inside me
that I didn’t know were closed.
They allowed me to see a world of other women
in the kitchen alone at night
trying to find that center of peace to allow them to go on.
In that lamplit kitchen, I drank in the words of their lives
to give me the courage I needed
to scrawl poems in a notebook
and to believe that these nighttime hours meant something,
that I could shape into the art that would save me.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan is the author of twenty-four books. Her latest poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). She received the American Book Award for her collection All That Lies Between Us. She is the founder and executive director of The Poetry Center at PCCC in Paterson, New Jersey, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review. She is Professor Emerita of English and creative writing at Binghamton University-SUNY. Website: mariagillan.com.