Grace Cavalieri reads "Safety"

"The poet Grace Cavalieri is a…truly generous friend of poetry and poets. In her writing and all she does her large-minded generosity shines." Robert Pinsky

In the folds and on the back cover of Other Voices, Other Lives, sits a few very special drawings —a rose, the dome of the capital building— by sculptor Kenneth Flynn, Grace's late husband. They were sketches made whenever Ken was waiting for Grace to return, and so he dubbed the series "Waiting for Grace." It makes sense then, since the sketches are rough, not overwrought, but meaningfully simple, that the two were hardly apart for long. Grace makes herself very clear when she recounts Ken's courage in the war, the strap around a young crossing guard's chest morphing into the straps holding a pilot to their seat, that it is the straps which give us courage, which are our homes, our safety. And so the poem asks the reader: "what could it be like to be strapless?"  And the final lines answer:

"although we were young, you were 15 and I was 13, since then, I've never known the world without you. Now, I must be 12"

Hear Grace read "Safety"

Safety

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