Poetry in Motion

When I was young I used to write poetry. Sometimes silly, sometimes serious, always rhyming, and usually about life or love or tormented emotions. I still have the originals somewhere, stuffed into a three ring binder. I'd even given copies to my little sister once years and years and years ago. Back when I was dirt poor. It was a year when I couldn't afford to buy Christmas gifts so I'd made them all. To Lilly, I'd given the gift of poetry. Little did I know that all that bad, horrible writing would come back to haunt me one day!

My mother had been gone for about a year when a bunch of us siblings got together for a shindig in Reno, NV. It was then that my baby sister (now forty four), presented me with her own gift of poetry. She'd taken all my old poems and had them professionally bound. There was a dedication page signed by my two sisters, my daughter, and posthumously by my mother (Lilly had lifted her signature off of a greeting card that she'd also saved). And one of the poems was even illustrated by my daughter, the artist. So there were all my sappy, rhyming love poems, bound beautifully into twelve hardback copies. What could I do but thank her for them. In fact, I think I even cried. But had I cried for the thoughtfulness of the gift or the fact that all that wonderful giving had been spent on such crappy poetry? In truth I think it was a little of both.

I still dabble in poetry from time to time but it's very different than the flowery, Hallmark stuff I'd written as a teen. Again, I save them all, stored away for some big, future event that probably will never happen. But now the repository is my computer instead of a binder. Some are finished, others are in a folder I simply call, Poetry in Motion. These are the ones I come back to and tweak off and on. Eventually, I might edit one enough for it to feel complete, or at least as close to complete as I think it'll ever get. Then I'll move it into another folder called Poetry. But the contents of that folder is light years away from what can be found in my three ring binder. An example of my more recent musings:

God’s Gifts

Coaxing
mold into a
petri-dish
He cultured up
Pasteur.

Crunched some
numbers to the sum
of Pythagoras.

Scribbled out
the first and
original
Picasso.

Pondered up
Plato and Socrates.

Ignored Aristotle.

Then,
throwing in a
monkey wrench
God created
Darwin.

He must have
laughed thinking
“this should keep
them busy
for a while.”

© 2009, Linda Leschak, all rights reserved