The Kid is All Right

Come and meet a little girl who spends a lot of time in my poems.

Sometimes she’s a character in the poem’s story. Often - so often - it’s her candid, imaginative gaze that draws me into writing a poem in the first place. Anyhow: she’ll be around, so I thought I should introduce her.

---

Blackberries

Your childhood grows in tangles
over a broken city fence.
Coastal breeze blows memory inland
to an orchard no one tends;
trees unpruned, their apples small
as your ten-year-old fist, hedged
by a barbed thicket of blackberry vines.
You are sunburned, round-bellied, silent,
clutching an old coffee can.
"Careful," says your father, "watch out for thorns."
You have cut yourself already
on the edge in his voice.
Ripe fruit, he tells you, falls into the hand
at an easy tug. When he looks away, your pickings
purple your tongue with sun-rancid sweetness,
while he tramples the vines, scornful of sweat and scratches,
scowls in gloom at the choicest fruit
spoiling out of reach in the August sun.

In his childhood, what they grew
or found was what there was to eat.
Habits cling like thorns; he goes on gathering,
distrusts the spread of supermarkets, grimly savors
delight in self-reliance, rage at waste.
Your birthright of his poverty is shame:
for purple stains of plenty on your lips and life,
for how he empties half his berries
into your can, when his fills faster,
for your round belly, full
of undigested secrets,
for your shrinking from the thorns
and the thrift of his love.

Now, in another summer, new harvest falls
easily into your fingers, stains your tongue
with memory's juices. Habits cling like thorns:
shame at abundance, the furtive, famished hunger
for sun-rancid sweetness, inevitable remorse
over the best fruit, spoiling out of reach.

---

Coloring Jesus' Beard

In a bright, narrow room furnished close to the floor,
kindergarten Sunday School has sung songs and heard a story

and now we are sitting at low tables, sharing a big box
of crayons, to color pictures of Jesus and the disciples

and I (that's me, the chubby solemn one with bangs
and a wheezy cough) am digging through the crayon box

to find my favorite, a stub of deep blue-green,
which I plan to use to color in that strange shape

outlined around Jesus' chin, a shape that I imagine
(having seen at a guess exactly no bearded men

in my first five years of life) to be some special decoration
for Bible people, since the disciples have them too.

I have already used sunshine-yellow to color the shapes
on the disciples' chins, but the one on Jesus needs

my favorite crayon, deep blue-green, the crayon of love;
Jesus loves me, we sing in Sunday School, and songs and stories

have already outlined that love in my kindergarten heart
and started to color it in, nesting shapes in crisp borders

laid out in a picture I partly see, mostly guess at, and so this morning
I love Jesus with the blue-green crayon, and by making room

for my classmates' hands as we sort the colors together.
                                                              And if Heaven turns out to be

(it wouldn't surprise me) something like kindergarten Sunday School - 
a light, good-tempered place where song and color flow

as free as story, and all God's children gather to make gifts
for God and for each other and for fun - if Heaven is anything

like that, and Jesus is the teacher, then I picture myself
(that's me, the chubby solemn one with shy shoulders

softening bit by bit) at watch in the quietest corner,
not joining yet the crowd around the teacher's chair, loved enough

to find myself in the room where he is, hoping
for no more than that - until, across a joyful

unmeasured distance, he looks at me, and what I see
in his face sends me running, shyness melted, to his side;

the eyes, yes, the hand outstretched, the smile - a grin
really - those things the song and stories taught me

to expect, but not the blue-green beard through which 
his mouth laughs as he calls me, coloring in my name.

---

Two poems, written several decades apart. Two memories, two different experiences - imperfect, real - of love.

One kid.

I can’t imagine how I’d manage to write poems if I ever grew all the way up. Any writer mines their childhood for things to write about. Some of us, maybe all of us - maybe just me? - rely on the kid inside to show us what’s odd and interesting and wants to be written about, whether in the past or in the present. The adult provides craft, and sometimes context, but it’s the kid who tells the story.

She’s some work, this kid. She’s wary, out in the world around other people, and she’s had reason to be. She’s quiet, except when she’s NOT. She’s hilarious when you least expect it. She’s hungry all the time - for stories, for affection, for peanut butter sandwiches. She tries hard to hide how hungry she is. She has a formidable vocabulary, and a formidable capacity to notice and feel and remember; she gets scared sometimes about using the one to give expression to the other.

When she relaxes and starts to talk, I start taking notes. And that’s when a poem starts to grow.