I am relentlessly cleaning out my storage area this week, going through boxes and boxes of old stuff, mostly from my long gone teaching days, and throwing out pounds of paper. Hundreds of pounds. But in the most unexpected places I find treasures. Letters from old friends I'd stuck in a notebook; tapes of my favorite music from 1991; poetry scribbled in the margins of my child psychology notes.
I thought I had all my poetry in a binder, but I keep finding random bits, some not even finished. Thoughts jotted down to keep me awake in class.
I don't write poetry much anymore. No time, mostly. I'm too busy writing prose, and I find my mind only focuses on language one way or the other. But I love the poetry because it is a snapshot of what was going through my mind, what was on my heart at a moment of time in my life, in a way that writing fiction cannot.
So on January 31, 1990, I wrote this:
Sometimes His voice
comes calling
like rolling thunder,
like driving rain.
Sometimes His voice is quiet,
and we wonder if
He knows our pain.
But He who spoke peace
to the waters
cares more for your life
than the waves.
And He who said
"You're forgiven,"
still says
you're forgiven today.
Thank you so much for sharing that... and I do hope you'll hang onto some bits of paper and poetry. (Sometimes stuff from our past surprises us, eh?)
ReplyDeleteI was throwing out whole spiral notebooks without even flipping through them, so I have no idea how many other poems I've lost. Ones, I suppose, at the time I didn't think important or worthwhile to polish. This one I happen to see in the margins of a spiral that held some other things I wanted to keep, so I salvaged it.
ReplyDeleteI rarely wrote in rhyme or obvious meter, but I guess I was in one of those moods. It's my lazy way to write. Also, it's definitely one of my shorter ones!
You'd think the past wouldn't surprise us seeing as how we've been there before, but it always does! :)