Spring
Okay, so I know it’s been forever since I’ve written in here, but I at least have a good excuse! I’ll be doing more writing now, since Eian is sleeping more and I have a computer upstairs.
Here’s something I wrote the other day:
Spring
Like the tight spiral of a fiddlehead fern,
singing with potential energy,
your foot curls in the cupped palm of my hand,
so soft that my fingers are clumsy,
and I must feel it with my lips.
This foot has yet to hold your weight
or know the spreading shift of sand,
the sticky coolness of wet grass,
or the slapping pavement of a full run.
Bee stings and kickball still wait
in the mists of childhood.
This foot will walk you down aisles,
will pace the floor with screaming babies,
will support you in old age.
This foot will carry you away from me.
I kiss each perfect toe;
they wait, like tree buds,
for the earth to turn a little.
iamsamiam said,
April 10, 2007 at 7:14 am
So much beautiful wisdom in such a little poem. The second to last stanza brings tears to my eyes every time. So true.
katenmw said,
April 10, 2007 at 8:30 am
Thanks! It feels good to be writing again!
iamsamiam said,
April 12, 2007 at 10:12 am
You know, I think blogging is a great way to practice writing skills.
mel said,
May 5, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Kate,
My friend Tim posted this poem the other day, and it made me recall yours, so I thought I’d share it:
Our Yard
by Timothy Novak
If there were a clothesline, it would suspend the dresses
from our thousand unaltared wedding dates,
stiff despite the breeze that moves along our house.
They would seem whiter in the sun of each next day.
It may be that our unpainted fence would be lined
with holes, dug by a pet, filled and dug again.
Some ideas of escape that had no goal in mind.
Markers of a need to explore new, similar ground.
We might labor beneath an oak whose rough bark
would leave our hands wrapped with blisters,
curled in cramps, unable to touch one another.
We might learn how to hold on more lightly.
Never mind that we were never afraid.
That we did not write down our days
so that later, in the dark or in a candlelight,
we would not have to try so hard to remember.
Never mind that this is what we were trying to avoid.
The descriptions of flowers, the blades that cut them.
Every letter ever left unopened, sent from home to home.
The dreams that cannot be shaken in the morning.
Perhaps we told each other all these stories so well
in our first few moments that there could be no doubt
that the years of brown grass would wind up green.
It may be that the warm made us ready for the cold.