I woke last night to the sounds of fifteen gunshots.
A poem is a strand from a Mirror.
A poem is a noun. Its meaning Its adjective,
it exists in one scene. A story is a verb.
Its theme is its adverb. It has motion.
It moves like a vehicle. Its story is how it moves.
But it’s theme is why it moves. As a child I realized
that my thoughts were not confined to a sentence;
that I did not think in sentences;
that I had relationships that I wanted to show
that were too complicated.
At church, as a child, I couldn’t read well from the Bible out loud.
and on my own I realized to study poetry, believing
that if I could write with confidence and ability
I would become familiar with words
and my reading in front of others
would become more professional.
I started leaning towards Browning’s work,
Robert Browning. I agreed with him that writing should be
a remembrance, an awareness, a shadow
of a previous point In the poem.
A soft echo barely reminding the reader
of other moments previously. So I started learning about
vowel sounds, the consonant sounds
and how to make soft rhymes and more importantly
how to mess with rhythm. I came up with an idea of
consonants and dissonance of creating and releasing tension
by using rhyme and meter and syncopation.
As a child I was perplexed. My thoughts were not confined to a sentence.
and then I learned to write in between the sentences.
I learned that words had texture and flow
and that you could create what you wanted to say
rather than just saying it.
One day coming home I considered what I would write for my journal.
My journal had perplexed me
I had made entries into it, but like a photograph
none of them seemed to capture what was originally there,
and then when I got home I wrote… Manicured lawns and leathered faces
calloused flowers in winter’s sparse hands.
And I knew I’d become a writer.
What had intrigued me about writing was a trip that I had taken
to Van Gogh’s museum in Amsterdam
where I’d seen Van Gogh’s cealing to floor painting
of the Peachtree at Arlis
It amazed me this man who worked on drawings
of the coal miners at the entrance of the museum,
and then passed the crows coming out of the field,
to the startling beauty of this tree.
And it was there that I realized Van Gogh’s skill
that I could feel what he was feeling when he was painting this painting.
And for one brief moment or two you and I are together as I write this
as a 7-year-old child that stood in a hallway.
September 