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.