On the Strand

I made up secret codes as a child --ways to write that were all my own.

And why should I not? Adults, they too had a secret code that lived

inside small books, lines of words strung together

like mismatched beads that clashed on their strands.

I didn’t understand it. I was not a poet.

Life heard my thoughts and laughed.

Now I am writing a new kind of code. Not a code of subterfuge and secrecy,

but a way of making sense of this existence:

of a first broken heart,

of a second love,

of family history forgotten behind dusty pictures of people I don’t know

and who don’t look like me ( who wears pin curlers anymore? ),

of an affair and the cracking of my foundation,

of hot peppers growing in black soil beyond a home that will always be a house.

Words come together to sort out the feelings that lay tangled in the bottom of my mind.

Life doesn’t come together like a novel.

No starts. No finishes. No order and plot,

aside from a plot of earth where we each are buried,

forgotten by those who step from our footprints.

Life comes, chosen like those unmatched beads, strung up,

in no order that makes sense - each heavy moment snagging.

I write poems to wrap around frayed and broken parts,

to bind them back together,

to make them whole, pasting them on paper

to hang around, signs planted on a worn path

still in use.