https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58831/old-love-56d23d8c91186
When my aunt died,
my uncle raised his hands
like a prophet in the Bible.
“I’ve lost my girl,” he said,
“I’ve lost my girl,” over and over,
shaking his head.
I didn’t know what to say,
where to look,
my quiet uncle raising his voice
to silence.
My aunt was eighty-seven.
“Listen,” my uncle said, sighing
like a tree alone at night,
“women know.
Every midnight on New Year’s Eve,
when others sang
and laughed and hugged,
your aunt looked at me,
tears in her eyes.
Sixty years.
She knew.
One day, we’d kiss good-bye.”
Pat Mora’s poem “Old Love” is a poem told from the perspective of a niece talking about how it felt when her uncle lost the love of his life, her aunt.
This poem uses a lot of poetic devices. In each stanza Mora uses similes “my uncle raised his hands like a prophet in the Bible…sighing like a tree alone at night.” Mora also use repetition as the uncle repeats “I’ve lost my girl, I’ve lost my girl,” Pat Mora used short quick sentence in her poem as well to make the words more impactful and more to the point so they hit harder on the reader.
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