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Aunt Tot

Aunt Tot

Ted Kooser

Distant cousins,
faceless in Oregon,
mailed back
her scanty ashes –
a pint-sized
paper carton
sealed with tape –
and asked for
proper burial
in Iowa. So this
was Tot,
my father's aunt,
who each year
sent a box
of Christmas holly;
Aunt Tot,
come home at last,
leaking her dust
from the seams
of a crumpled box.
So Dad
and the minister
took her out
to the family plot,
and with a borrowed
post-hole digger
dug a post hole
six feet deep,
and put her in,
and prayed for good
Aunt Tot,
and filled the hole
with Iowa.

Prairie Schooner, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Summer 1983), p. 36

View Author Bio
Ted Kooser

Ted Kooser is a former U.S. Poet Laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He is a retired life insurance executive and teaches part-time at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His list of jobs includes paper carrier, agricultural fieldwork, sign painter, high school teacher, insurance executive, and part-time professor.

Author /// Comment

“Home is where two people can sit in a room for the space of an hour and neither feels the obligation to say anything.”

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