Monday, April 8, 2019

A Poem a Day

First thing. I am not a poet.

Second thing. I admire poets immensely. (I'm looking at you, Wade and Lisa.)

Third thing. I attended a poetry workshop taught by the above Lisa this weekend.

Fourth thing. April is National Poetry Month. Yes! It's a thing! 

Fifth thing. I'm accepting the challenge to write a poem a day and post it here.

Sixth thing. I suck and I know it.

Seventh thing. That was a disclaimer because I'm REALLY SCARED ABOUT DOING THIS.

Eighth thing. But yeah. These are just drafts, written quickly.

Now that I've established all that, here's today's offering.

The Odyssey

I thought I remembered what happened
in The Odyssey, which Miss Nelson made us
read in AP English the year I was 17.

But now that I'm reading it several 
lifetimes later, I am discovering 
I barely remember any of it.

Not Calypso and her "gleaming, glittering" chair.
Not the horse-lord Nestor's eldest daughter, Polycaste,
who rubbed oil on Telemachus's skin.
Not Nausicaa, who welcomed salt-stained Odysseus
to her father's kingdom.

Instead I remember the boys in my class 
with their surfer boy hair and their 
pachuli-scented jeans and the way all of us
stared out the classroom window past the 
track and the field and the streets and 
the blue, blue mountain to the west

Wondering, perhaps, what our own voyages
might be.

3 comments:

radagast said...

So happy that you're doing this! "Past the track and field and the streets and the blue, blue mountain to the west" is so fine. I am suddenly much more excited to see what April brings.

CSIowa said...

I have something to look forward to! Thanks, Ann. Also, I really loved reading Madeline Miller's Circe more than I've enjoyed anything in a while. And then I read Leif Enger's Virgil Wander, which was also so lovely for me. Journeys for the win!

Lisa B. said...

I really love those surfer boys--that stanza is your true ending, imho.