A Story of Blinking

A Story of Blinking
-inspired by a painting by my sister Madelene

Long after the home had grown
too old for the children,
the youngest returned to see how small her room
had become.

The bed lay tucked in around the shadows.
The lamps were lost
in a hazy sleep.
The stuffed animals watched
the intricacy of the wallpaper
not recognizing her
enough to turn their heads.
The curtains were drawn
and faded
like they belonged in a doll house.

Perhaps that’s what it had been.

A fairytale
like the ones that had leapt from their pages
into the midnight
beyond her tower windows,
the highest place
in her house.

Now the books slumped
against the scarce selection
of the bookshelf,
the memories she read too many times,
or not at all because
she never wanted them.

She flips through a couple
of the best ones
and remembers the beginnings
then the endings,
then reflects a moment on the anxiety
in between.

Her art hangs scattered on the walls,
real paintings and real emotions
she forgot to take with her:

a sketch of her father reading,
another of her mother playing her favorite melody
on the cello. She is listening this time;
it is surely her favorite melody.

A hidden garden and an orchard.
She can smell within the dried paint
the lavender perfume
and the maturing girl ready to plunge
far down
to a grounded world.

Almost she hears
inside the painting
from the acrylic background
the call to return.

And finally she discovers the last one, a small canvas
smeared with dusk
and words scratched into the clouds
like faint stars:

Once upon a time in a far
away place

he climbed to the highest
and she waited for him in the
and the moral of the story is
you blink your eyes like maybe
if you blink fast enough I’ll
disappear like a
frog princess

and they lived happily ever
after

She closes her eyes and imagines her spirit
as she was when she filled the room,
flitting from moment to moment like a butterfly,
gathering stories like they were marigolds.

The eyes reopen to a dying day. She leaves,
wishing it would rain, and descends
stairs that are steeper going down.

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I wrote this poem last night and revised it a little this morning. It's one of the longer poems I've written. It is probably still very much in the rough draft stage, but I like it and want to know what y'all think. Any themes you see? Any lines you particularly like? And lines you don't like or don't understand or you feel take away from the poem? Instead of me telling you what the poem is about, what do you think it is about? Yes, I have my ideas (otherwise I wouldn't have written the poem), but I'm looking for feedback here. 

Oh, and in case you were wondering which painting the poem is based off of, it is the last painting in the poem, the one with words scratched in. And the words are copied verbatim because I thought they were very interesting. Hope you enjoy the poem!

The Edge of the Fireworks

Happy 4th of July everybody! I wrote a new 4th of July poem so I'll post it along with the one I posted last year this time. 

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The Edge of the Fireworks
-You have freedom, now what will you do with it? 

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We celebrated freedom
from beneath the back porch;
ears pressed against the rain
to hear the thunder.

Lightning became our fireworks;
ignited by some unseen hand,
it escaped to every corner
of our eyes. David said

he wished his kids could see this,
and took pictures of the storm red,
the unfinished sunset, the moment
someone else was having.

I moved to the edge,
felt the tendrils of the fury
and the wind shift towards me
into my empty hands.

And I couldn’t go further.
I sat back down and remembered home,

while he continued to capture memories
from a confined distance. 

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Poetry is fiction. In actuality, at my camp, a group of us went out back to look at the fireworks, not just two of us. But while I write a poem, I begin to get a feeling for a theme or something. The quote is actually sort of unknown. A friend of mine put it as his status on facebook today, but I don't know if it's his quote or not; I only know it doesn't come up in google as a known quote. But to me, the quote captures a bit of what I wanted to capture with the poem: the sense of how we can limit ourselves in how we use our freedom. Did it work? Do you like the poem? Let me know what you think.

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Parting on the 4th of July

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These are the days of independence
when old things break
and pieces are lost forever.

Every final night at this camp
all the stars have dangled like white threads
being pulled a little closer.

These threads are slowly fraying.
It seems our destiny to spread out, to scatter,
to branch away from any home we make.

Once entwined, we are a gathering ready to disperse
like the fireworks bursting into the star-washed sky
only to fade and fall into darkness.

Maybe, mornings from now,
we too will find ourselves in hidden places,
but as children waking in the grass.

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I wrote this poem around 4 years ago while a camper at a different branch of the camp I'm at now. Funny, huh? Anyway, I really love this poem so I seem to post it every 4th of July. Hope you enjoy it too, and as always I'm open to suggestions.

Take care y'all!