I used to write poetry, mostly when I was in my twenties. I didn’t write a lot because my inner critic was overbearing at the time, and made me very insecure and therefore unmotivated. And despite the privilege I had of participating in a university poetry group (somewhat intimidatingly called the Algonquin Square Table, headed by a published poet), I just couldn’t indulge in the amount of writing I wanted to.
Since then I’ve written a poem here and there, but over the last year or so I’ve been feeling much more drawn to writing poetry again, remembering how much I enjoyed playing with words while memorializing a particular feeling and/or event in my life.
I consider writing to be like a game or puzzle, and one that’s so specific to the writer that only the writer can solve it. And like an asymptote (a curve forever approaching, but never reaching, the x-axis), the artist never entirely completes the puzzle, even when he or she is finished working on it.
Anyway, I recently discovered a fragment of a poem I had written when F was a baby. I still like it, and today added a few lines and a title, and figure it’s worth putting “out there” so that I can start getting a little braver with my writing overall. Here it is.
Grandmother’s Visit
You were in my arms
when we said goodbye,
waving through the window,
and once she was out of sight
you looked at me
with sympathetic eyes,
and sighed,
as though you had already learned,
in your less than half year
on this earth,
a thing or two
about the impossibility
of mothers.
I started this poem before I discovered unschooling, and have wondered in the last little while what it would be like to compose poetry with an unschooling theme. Perhaps with my blog writing I’ll gain enough inspiration and experience (and courage) to one day do just that.
