The healing journey of a widowed, unschooling badass in Delaware.
She’s always in the garden
Beneath the dirt breathing her magic
Pressing mystery shoots into the sunlight
Opening pink picture petals.
I tilled the modest plot to start fresh
Yet it remains her domain
It is her beautiful earth
Her seeds and surprises bring it alive in May.
We plant and weed and tend
She feeds
We work
Yet the reward is not our doing.
This garden is God speaking in her voice
It is reborn for good and beauty.
It’s a mystery to me why I stopped writing poetry in my twenties.
I’m sure drinking had something to do with it. But that’s not enough. It was part of a process that had been working in me for years. An intentional repression of my empathetic self.
Poetry worked against that process. I learned that to excel in the art I needed to be open to emotions, mine and others’. I had been walking away from that deep well of emotion for years and wasn’t prepared to change my course.
In my last semesters before leaving college, I took more poetry workshops than were allowed. I worked the system to spend more time on the one thing that brought me value in the university.
In doing so, I started writing about a secret in confusing ways. I had bottled it up and needed to share, but it wasn’t all mine, so my poems became increasingly opaque.
I don’t yet have the courage to write about it.
I played with words today, like I did when I was young. I still feel the block. I still feel that secret holding me back.
These feelings emerge as I remember that April is National Poetry Month. This used to be a big deal in my world.
I wasn’t looking for a new challenge, but I believe one has found me. I’m going to publish poetry every day for the next month. It’ll be bad, like the wordplay below. I’ll write until I can’t contain that ancient secret any longer. I’ll write until I produce that poem I promised Mary when we were dating. I’ll find the words I need on these magnetic tiles until I can form my own.
