My Mother’s Pillow by Cecilia Woloch : American Life in Poetry #228 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laur

I don’t often mention literary forms, but of this lovely poem by Cecilia Woloch I want to suggest that the form, a villanelle, which uses a pattern of repetition, adds to the enchantment I feel in reading it. It has a kind of layering, like memory itself. Woloch lives and teaches in southern California. My Mother’s Pillow

My mother sleeps with the Bible open on her pillow;