When I Wrote My First Poem

                                               (September 2013)

I probably didn’t write it

I probably sang it as I skipped to the creek

As I jumped from rock to rock

As I returned home up the hill shaded by buckeye trees

And smelling of wild roses

Or maybe it was when I climbed from tier to tier

In our old tobacco barn

Playing pretend games

And finding something new and exciting

In every spider webby corner

Every slant of sunlight dancing with dust motes

I still write poems like this

Not writing them, I mean

I sing them

Sometimes rhyming

Sometimes loose and free and flowing

More like the creek in our valley

Than the woodpeckers’ steady rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat

On the hollow beech

And I sing in the car and in my kitchen

And in the garden when I’m picking green beans

Trouble is, I rarely remember these poems, these songs

For longer than a minute

And I lament that I don’t carry pad and pen in my pocket

Or recorder in my car

How many profundities have found no ears

But mine to inspire?

How many beautiful noticings have blessed my heart alone?

I regret for a moment or two my lack of memory

But then I forget what I’m regretting

As a swallowtail butterfly catches my eye and carries it

Far beyond my soul searching exercise

Or my old cat begs to have his ears scratched

And can anyone give full attention to a purring cat

Without losing track of most everything else?

And maybe it’s okay that I don’t remember

That first poem I wrote

Or the one I sang this morning as I lay in the early morning stillness

And listened to my husband’s soft breathing

Maybe what I get from it is enough—I am being

Myself, in the moment, spontaneous

I am (as Mary Oliver put it

In her poem she remembered to write down)

“Married to amazement”

And what a fine state of marital bliss it is!                 

Glenda for the Poplar Grove Muse