Poetry Corner

While I was struggling to stay on the cross country team in college, I also took a few classes in creative writing, and a couple of those were in poetry. I don’t write as much as I’d like—or, I don’t write well as often as I’d like—but every once in a while an idea pops up and I have to (pardon me) run with it.

Given that my readership is so small, and I have little else to post this week, I think I’ll share something that came to me this afternoon:

Untitled

If Boston was the cradle of our country,
it grew into her teenage bedroom:
rowdy and aspirational,
moody and cold—
a walled garden
of perfect essays and SAT scores,
an underdog,
cursed by Bambino,
redeemed by Papi,
saved by Meb,
sainted by Des.
The last stop for everyone
who will never make the Olympics,
which is everyone,
give or take.

I skip my run this morning and do the dishes,
water the plants,
fix coffee in our remodeled kitchen
(but not by us);
gray skies over Jersey.
It’s mornings like these I stop sweating
and count my luck:
a morning without Boston,
without obsession,
allowing myself to age for a moment
before I continue
the remodel of the last half-decade.
I’ve gotta get to Boston
so I can enjoy more mornings like this
in peace.

I’ve gotta get to Boston
because that’s where it started,
and that’s where it ends:

We begin again with our hero in Jersey,
the Hero’s Journey completed—
swords into plowshares
into birdhouses
and herb gardens and preschool.
A chickadee fledges,
forages, furrows its brow,
burrows into mother.
Gray skies overhead,
weather that could always be something else:
hot, humid, static.
Static on the TV screen
moving endlessly,
shifting, waiting
for the latest prestige dramedy to drop
and binge.
This one’s about family,
the one on the couch,
shoes on the rack,
medal on the mantle,
head on the pillow.
I set my alarm;
run tomorrow.

See you next week.