In honor of the writing project retreat I attended this weekend, I am going to post here a revised copy of "Wings," and a couple of others that I did some serious changing to.
By the way, can I just say that any teacher alive would benefit from participating in writing project work? I've never actually done the workshop, but I helped to plan an invitational this weekend, and just being around those folks helped me to feel invigorated about my poetry again.
Thanks, all of you.
Plus, I found out some great information about the turtle as a symbol for planet Earth, the personification of goddess energy, representative of the continuing cycle of give and take, and possessing shields that protect us from harm. Cool.
Wings
One grand and coming day
I will sprout wings.
The swirling, lifting breeze will
chime out the hours
as the time grows near.
Small bumps will jump from my shoulder blades,
Itchy feathers one by one sweep my arms
Bits of down float sunlit through the air.
As I gain altitude,
an eagle's-eye perspective:
Roads float above green hills,
Horizon angles into the suspended blue sky.
Will my aerial view
Affect my earthly sight?
That Hat
That hat struts in,
feather waving
trench coat swirling.
It pauses
and surveys
with a tilted head and
a cynical, jaunty eye
the crowd of coffee-sippers,
blissfully unaware of its presence.
The crowd bobs
and sips
and sits
unimpressed
unreactive.
Nevertheless,
that hat maintains its integrity,
its pride,
its sense of place,
and wavers on
to an appointed seat
in glory.
First Snow
The first snow of the season
is a blessing, a baptism, an epiphany.
One that appears,
rebelliously,
on Halloween.
Slipping softly over the jack o'lanterns
hissing out candles
Lightly anointing the foreheads
of the assembled pirates, ballerinas,
monsters, and ladybugs,
it drips and floats.
Here, they huddle around the front porch light,
offering up the emptiness of their bags,
praying for Snickers or Skittles
or peanut butter cups.
As they walk away, toward the
luminarias and fake spiders next door,
the snow fills their footprints,
erasing all evidence of their presence.
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2 comments:
Never knew that you wrote poetry. Guess that's because we were all so buried in academic prose at UGA while you were a doc student. Thanks for sharing. I was right there in the words, with you, experiencing what you were able to help me recall of first snows back in upstate NY, of flying (a recurrent dream that has me finally taking off, sans wings, after jumping higher and higher from a trampoline--an object I've never been on, oddly enough).
Wonderful. I like your imagery of feathers. It is a shift away from them as being weightless; I feel here (in Wings) that they are forceful and weighty. They offer flight, which itself is so difficult.
Maybe I should start camping too. I like your blog.
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