The Old Arm-Chair

The poem takes the form of an address to a worn armchair, but it is really a love letter to a mother. Cook writes with plainspoken tenderness: the chair remembers everything - knees bent in prayer, fingers that smoothed tangled hair, the weight of a body that once radiated warmth and is now gone. The speaker returns to this empty vessel again and again, not to grieve but to feel close to what was lost. There is no pretension here, no ornate language - just the raw, ordinary objects that carry the weight of an entire life. For anyone who has lost a parent and found themselves circling back to some small thing left behind, this poem is quiet devastation. It endures because the thing it describes - the way love lives in furniture, in rooms, in the shape of things - is simply true.