I cannot remember falling in love with poetry. I suspect it happened before I was born. I do remember realizing that I could rhyme in second grade, and my first poems were written then. (The sun is like a blanket to me / as it covers the earth with its sunshine. / A wonderful feeling comes over me / as if the whole world is mine.) I found a cohort in Kathie, and we wrote poems about animals together in fourth grade. And so it went on, until I discovered e. e. cummings in high school. He rocked my world, but that was nothing compared to what the Beat Poets did to me.
So many years of reading, studying, writing and teaching poetry later, I am still in love with poetry.
There was poetry in my day today. Mary posted a May Sarton poem on my wall. I read it four times. And then Stephanie posted something about her little guy thinking that when you die, you go to college (instead of heaven) and I recalled a poem I wrote when Sam was little. He thought God had a remote control to send people from their graves up to heaven. When your kid says something like that, you just have to write a poem. I sent it to Stephanie and we had a nice chat.
It would seem fitting to end this post with a poem. This is a little gem written by David Allan Evans. Despite its small size, it packs a wallop. It's a great example of the power poetry has to evoke emotion. Go ahead, read it. Then read it again. Then say, "Wow!" And you will be in love with poetry too.
Bullfrogs
for Ernie, Larry, and Bob
sipping a Schlitz
we cut off the legs,
packed them in ice, then
shucked the rest back into
the pond for turtles
ready to go home
we looked down and saw
what we had thrown back in:
quiet-bulging eyes nudging along
the moss's edge, looking up at us,
asking for their legs
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