I am searching my house up and down for a poem I wrote last year on same random sheets of paper. Just to be safe, I pulled out my poetry folder from the writing drawer and check to make sure I hadn’t out it away – I hadn’t. It was interesting though to look back at some of my writing that dates from the late eighties and early nineties, when I was a child.
Very little of this material is dated, but two of these pieces (Circles, and It Couldn’t Last) are typewritten, which means I most probably wrote them the summer I was 13, while staying with my grandparents in Wyoming while the rest of the family moved from Wyoming to Illinois. The untitled tanka is from a school project on poetry – a little volume demonstrating different forms. Other poems in the handwritten volume reference the Horned One and the Lady of Sea, placing the writing somewhere between the summer ’84 when I first encountered goddess spirituality while searching for books by Andre Norton, and ’89, when I got my first typewriter.
It Couldn’t Last
Laughing in love,
saying words we neither meant.
If time in love is wasted,
it was wasted time well spent.
Circles
Circles circumscribe the world.
Red slashed for no, green lit for go,
and foiled latex assuring save sex.
Coffee mugs, and water jugs,
the throat the killer throttles.
The needle, pill, the cigarette, and of course the bottles.
Sugar cookies, ice cream cones,
smiley faces, aerodomes.
With each life take, each baseball hurled
another circle round the world.
Untitled
Blue sky high above.
Quite bright sun glowing high up.
Birds’ shadows darting
across the ground. Dark, smooth like
stones skipping across the water.
And the sweater:
Some assembly required. 5 skeins of golden brown, two of white, 100% wool, and so old that the labels are just ‘ounces of worsted’, with no yardage. Roughly estimating 150 yards per skein, that gives me just over a thousand yards, enough for a small sweater. I’m thinking colorwork in the yoke, maybe at the cuffs.
Knit-Write 