Upon a Painted Ocean

In third grade,

They handed me a poetry book

And I found it terribly boring.

I was a child of prose, reading stories of adventures

And faraway lands.

I would sooner dive into the depths

Of a good storybook

Rather than swim past stanzas.

In middle school,

I would sooner fall asleep

than listen to the poems they taught to us.

I had heard Frost a thousand times,

Poe could only slightly hold my interest

And the books of my youth

Still held me firmly in their grasp.

In high school,

The books of my youth

Weren't worth swimming in anymore.

But I discovered something that took me

To the water once more.

A rime of an ancient mariner

With an albatross hung upon his neck

Took me under the waves

And plunged me into something brand new.

A brand new ocean had appeared in my world

And in it's currents and caverns

Wordsworth, Whitman, Keats and Yeats

Were all there waiting for me to discover

Their words and worlds took me places

I had never been to before

To the Tintern Abbey, to Byzantium,

To an appreciation and celebration of the world.

In the maelstrom of poets,

I found a treasure trove of emotions

Hidden within the eye of the storm.

Such emotions a piece of prose

Could never produce within me

Inspired me with such force

That I would lay awake at night

Just to find the right words
To recreate such emotions.

The mariner hath my will.