More Games Poets Play

When "working on it" doesn't work so well, it might be time to do the other thing.

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

I wrote a post a couple of months ago about poems that grow out of the prompts and noodlings poets play with when we “can’t think what to write.” Turns out, I have a couple more.

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IDENTITIES


I was a treasure map
	no one knew how to read.
I am water-colors in a forest,
	pines rooted deep by a chuckling stream.
I will be a mirror 
	that my reflection can see through.

I was a safe
	lined in steel-colored silk, sealed with a porcelain padlock.
I am a closed book, reading
	itself to find the spell
	that calls a breeze, lifts and spreads the pages.
I will be a tower room
	curved windows floor to ceiling, tapestries between.

I was a dusty light-bulb, waiting
	dimly for the flick of a switch.
I am a candleholder, 
	and the one who lights the candle.
I will be a lighthouse, 
	and the keeper of the light.

I was the smell of cut grass and violets
	and my mother’s suntan lotion.
I am the night voice of the foghorn
	and the creak of eucalyptus boughs in the wind.
I will be a garden tended at the edge
	of a forest, in sight of a snow-streaked mountain.

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LINES


When you’re weary, feeling small
When you feel sad and under a curse
When the moon comes over the mountain
When the saints go marching in

If I loved you
If I had a hammer 
If somehow you could pack up your sorrows
If you’re going to San Francisco

Come all you fair and tender maidens 
Come on along, little children, come along
Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call
Come on 'a my house, a’ my house

Take the ribbon from your hair
Take my life and let it be
Take these chains from my heart
Take my hand, take my whole life too

What you didn’t do to bury me
What a dream I had, pressed in organdy
What child is this, who, laid to rest
What you want, baby, I got 

I am slow to anger, but I toe the line
I am a rock, I am an island
I am crazy for trying and crazy for crying
I am not throwing away my shot

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[You can listen to an audio reading of the poems using the widget above the photograph. Better yet, try reading them aloud yourself! It’s what poems are for.]

I wrote “Identities” in my late thirties, while I was spinning my wheels after setting aside a fiction project that had absorbed me for a long time. If I wasn’t going to write a best-selling novel, what could I write? Could I write? I don’t remember where I found the "I was/I am/I will be” prompt, but it lit up a couple of pages of my notebook and reminded me that yes, I could write poems. (By the way, the version of this poem that I saved has maybe twice as many stanzas as you’re reading here. You don’t get to see all my identities.)

“Lines” took shape in my notebook one day during the fateful, dreadful summer of 2020, when I had run out of any words of my own. Determined to put something on paper, I scribbled down a line of Paul Simon’s, and then a line from Godspell, and then … kept going. When it was done I wasn’t sure if it was, well, a real thing — but it had a voice and a personality of its own, and when I included it the following year in a small collection of recent poems for my friends to read, it was the one that seemed to intrigue and delight them the most. Go figure.

Something I like about both these poems, something they have in common, is a sense of having been made at play rather than meticulously crafted. Oh, you’d best believe I spent time polishing a phrase here and there in “Identities” and rearranging the lines in “Lines,” but neither of them is perfectly symmetrical … and they don’t need to be. This is not poetry as the Taj Mahal, this is poetry as a kid’s fort in the back yard — built from whatever comes to hand, wonky and lopsided and made to play in, made for fun.

Come to think of it, I’ve written a much more Serious Poem about building a kid’s fort in the back yard. Or maybe it’s not as serious as I think it is. We’ll look at that one next week.