This thing I’ve been working on for 15 years

It’s embarrassing to say I’m a poet. It shouldn’t be, but it is. The devil beside me rolls her eye’s, and I can hear it before she says it, “Sure you are. And by the way, no one reads poetry”. Doesn’t the word “poetry” sound pretentious? I write poems.

Once I went to a writers conference to learn more about publishing. In one class I went to, the instructor, a journalist, asked us to introduce ourselves and what type of writing we do. When I answered, he re-stated the title of the class to me, and asked “Are you sure you want to take this class?”. For the life of me I can’t remember the name of that class. I stayed as much out of righteous indignation as I did to learn about the topic he was teaching.

As a school kid I enjoyed the times when we were assigned to write poems. Two of my favorite childhood books are poem books for kids.

One of them, an antique, has a tattered cover with a faded, but charming illustration pasted on the front. It is a treasure, poems by Robert Louis Stevenson.

I bought a reprint of the book to read my kids when they were small. We enjoyed the poems, but I wish I had read to my kids from the same copy Great Grandma read from.

As much as I loved poems, I wrote sparsely as a kid and teenager. When I really made a point of writing was the year my son was born. I had to wrap my head around becoming a mother, and all it took to get there. Grasp that my first baby had died at birth. I’d once had a notion that if I did everything right, everything would go well. Disillusionment is tough to heal. Any woman who has given birth, knows birthing rarely goes according to plan. All the mothers down through time - I was now connected to them. An infinite sisterhood for this only-child, now mother. I made a goal to write a poem a day for a year. I mostly did.

My son is 15 now. I’ve had times of writing, and times of not. Times of intense editing. Times of meeting with other poets, and of reading at the poets open-mic. I shared my poem “more than a tear” to fellow parents of dead infants. My yoga teacher was unexpectedly present in the group. She invited me to share another poem in yoga class. My son was 1 then, I haven’t performed a poem since.

Now I wonder, what if I died with these poems still locked away in my computer, and in notebooks on an obscure shelf in the studio? What a tragedy, my most meaningful work dying with me.

Like a teenager, poems are meant to have a life of their own. How soon do I send them out? Can they handle the crush of the world? Ready or not, time marches on.

Who will help me see these adolescents into the world?

I invite you to close your eyes and listen to the recording below.