Poetry

I am still alive. My absence is a mystery even to me. But I still have things to write about.

For the holidays, my son gave me a gift certificate to take a writing class. I signed up for a poetry course. It ended last week.

Somehow I missed that the last poem was not to be submitted. It has been such a charge to have an audience - even of one, the professor - for every poem I wrote these ten weeks. And he said nice things - mostly.

So, I wrote that last poem. A poem that would encapsulate something that we carried with us from the "rock" stars of our childhood.

Here it is:

Needs

We lock our fingers together

and mime our imprisonment.

As the shaggy boys harmonize, 

we clutch our none-too-impressive chests.

We are in "Chains!" and 

we swirl and dip and sidestep - as one.

 

We trained for years -

singing rounds in the car.

Mom taught us songs 

about "bananas"

and "chasing rainbows" 

and "old mill streams".

 

Now the music is our own.

No Mr. Sandman, No Stranger in Paradise.

All our very own. The words a code

 our mother cannot decipher.

 

And then she does. 

We come home from school

And "Yesterday" plays on the stereo.

 

The shaggy boys are older.

They play alien sounds.

They sing of other needs

beyond love and dancing.

 

We sit in the evening

reading or knitting;

we harmonize to the arrival of the sun

or the "wind that turns me on".

The music knots around us

and in us,

then and into the stars.

Bound by more than blood. Bound

by the need to sing.