Old Oak - August 2007

I'm trying something scary and different by posting one of my poems.

There were years in my past when I wrote lots of them, and most are quite mediocre. But when I read through them they serve as a looking glass into my troubled, searching-for-love teen and young adult years. They mirror the firecracker creativity fueled by alcohol in my early days of drinking. Later, they are a gasp of sick ego and longing for wholeness as alcoholism grabbed hold of my life. Finally, from the tender healing of early sobriety, they manifest a sigh...and then they stopped all together. I have speculation but no explanation for this: I wrote a poem for Mike to celebrate our wedding in 1995 and after that no more poetry came. Not until last August when this one did, and none since.

I want to acknowledge Marlys Marshall Styne who delights with her rictameters at Write Your Life!, and for advocating "writing for everyone." How empowering is that?! I ordered her book, Reinventing Myself - Memoirs of a Retired Professor from Amazon.com and it arrived this weekend. I'm anxious to read it after seeing the table of contents.

I'm not going to over-think these poems of mine, for which poetry review have a different meaning. On a personal level they really are a review of key stages of my life, mostly brazen vestiges of a careless past. Not the easiest things for me to review, let's say. Depending upon how this particular foray into sharing the most recent one goes, I might select more of those old poems to post. Or not.

Old Oak - August 2007

You sprawling giant

gave up one bough near

targets too precious and sealed your fate there

on the hill beside a middle school parking lot

that borders the soccer field where once stood

the acorn-bearing community you grew with 300 years ago.

The twisted limb you let loose after a gentle summer rain was greater than

trunks of the 100-year-old oaks growing on either side of the second soccer lawn

a block from the chipping machine that now sings with your branches.

It was an impressive, heavy bough full of green life

but your wound showed weakness inside despite the

smooth, tight-grained beauty of

these delicious-smelling logs

that must be

cleared quickly

before a new year of

history lessons take root.

(c) M Lydia M, 2007