Poetry?

Teach ME?

 

What are you anyway?

Something to be shelved

In a toddler’s sticky nursery

In a dusty nook of some academic room

In the mouths and minds of the passionate

 

Something to be taught to me.

Brought to me.

 

Wait.

Don’t push aside the phrases

That rocked you to sleep

And expressed your praises

And paint the memories

Of so many adolescent phases

 

Where prose couldn’t satisfy

Your love affair with song

Poetry reclined in your head

And on your lips for so long

That you finally learned

To let Emotion’s impious prong

Pierce your heart

 

Walking home alone

Your compositions were respite

Or an excuse to let out the tone

Of a chuckle or titter or a laugh

Or a way to get in the zone

Before hours of this or that

 

Maternal

Therapeutic

Free

 

That’s what poetry has been to me.