Last month I saw this 5 Minute Breakfast Poem writing prompt on a bunch of blogs that I read. I loved reading everyone’s poems. Such an inspiration to me. Of course, me being a me, I couldn’t get my act together for the month of April and never wrote one single poem.
Now that it is May and nobody is doing the prompt anymore… guess who finally wrote a poem? It is nothing special, let me warn you. I will follow it with a poem that I did not write, but that I do think is very special. How’s that for ya?
Spring
The trees outside my window have just begun to bud
and in this one little act of nature I have found hope.
The ice and snow and negative temperatures
are a distant memory tucked away like my
jackets, tights and wool mittens.
Last night I dr0ve home with the sun roof open and the music loud.
Like a bear waking up from winter,
I ease back into the world.
I wonder if it is like this for everyone.
This rebirth.
The waking up of my senses
and soul.
And here is one of my all-time favorite poems by Sharon Olds.
I Go Back to May 1937 (from The Gold Cell)
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it–she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.
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