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The title of this specific piece of poetry is . Now, this title does not really give a reader much to go on. The only thing one would know about this poem is that it is a small one and that it may be about a deceased person or someone who new someone who dies. I s ....

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.... home where his mother seems still to preside--diminished now over an outmoded world. She is smaller, more vulnerable, someone to be protected. "Matku," he says tenderly in Czech, "Mon maminku," my little mommy, which the translator has rendered as "my diminutive mom." He imagines that after all these years she's still sitting back there, quietly uncomplaining, thinking about his father who died so long ago. It is the next moment in the poem, when the tense radically changes, that I find especially compelling. "And then she is skinning fruit for me," he says, "I am in the room. Sitting right next to her." He doesn't say "And then she was skinning f ....