She was ninety-five when she finally told her story.

Miriam Kam Weisbrod lived a life most people only read about — she sailed to Panama in 1941 to marry a soldier, found her honeymoon interrupted by the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and went on to call Japan, France, Italy, and Germany home before she ever picked up a pen. It wasn't until she lost her husband in 1980 that she began writing — and it wasn't until decades later, at ninety-five years old, that she finally gathered a lifetime of memory into verse.

Poems From My Heart is that lifetime, told poem by poem. Beginning in a cradle painted white and ending in quiet reflections on faith and mortality, Miriam's poetry moves through childhood in Depression-era Brooklyn, the ache of wartime love, the noisy joy of raising four children, and the slow, tender business of growing old. Along the way there's humor too — a poem scolding Mother Nature herself, a stubborn beard that comes between two lovers, a bottle of castor oil that no child of the 1920s could escape.

Each poem is paired with simple black-and-white illustrations, and the collection closes with a genuine piece of history: a 1941 newspaper clipping of Miriam herself, smiling and waving as she boards the ship that would carry her toward the rest of her life.

This isn't poetry written from craft or ambition. It's poetry written from memory — plainspoken, unpolished, and completely honest, the kind that only comes from someone who has truly lived what she's writing about. If you've ever wanted to hand someone you love a piece of your own history, or if you simply believe that ordinary lives deserve to be told extraordinarily, Poems From My Heart is a book worth making room for on your shelf.

Sheila Weisbrod

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