Open Mic Night: “Sky Birth”
I realize I’m not writing as much as a used to. This is probably due to three key reasons:
A) I’m working full-time now
2) I was focusing on buying a new computer and transferring my URL to Wordpress for a while
D) I just discovered Half-Life 2.
Having said that…more than a few times I’ve considered posting some of the poetry I’ve written in some of my college workshops on here. And I think for the sake of staying semi-active, and for making this blog a bit more comprehensive, I’m finally gonna do it. I thought about looking through my archives and picking out some “early-period” stuff as well, but it was just too much. To simplify, I’ll stick with just workshop material, and every few days I’ll post a poem that I presented in class, starting with one from my first poetry-exclusive workshop.
It’s funny, re-reading a lot of the older work in these folders. A lot of what I imagined at the time to be these profound metaphors now seem pretty lame, or sometimes plain nonsensical. But I think it’s interesting to try to reconnect with older “versions” of your self that you don’t necessarily relate to anymore. To even kind of embrace the whininess or pretentiousness–because if nothing else, it was real at the time.
This piece I still kinda like, though. The exercise was to write a poem from a random newspaper headline. After you have that base, it’s cool to see how your obsessions kind of leak back in to make this hybrid of author-specific themes and an out-there “plotline.”
This one’s from November 15th, 2008. It’s called “Sky Birth.”
Sky Birth
Against the pinks and dark blues of sunset
I plummet, cradling
my doomed and pregnant stomach—
bloated and curved like the top of the world.
My body breaks
through clouds and I imagine
the streaks I leave in the sky
as abstract footprints, proof
that I have lived.
Tiny, uncalloused hands, whose prints extend only
to the thin walls around my heart, now pound
against my flesh, reaching up
to find my ribs and force itself
away from me.
Below my skin, muffled whimpers
mean my baby thinks
it can be happy there, on the earth
getting clearer and more colorful
the closer we come to smashing into it.
It all made so much sense: marriage, pregnancy,
saying, “I love you;”
but now I’m falling, numb, a baby
inside of me aching to see
the sun and sky for the very first time—unaware
that soon we’ll hit the ground,
hard, like birds born without wings.
Tears roll upward at this speed
like wrong-sided rain, my long hair hangs
above me. Everything
is backward now.
At this distance pull the chord,
they said; it is your lifeline.
Pull it, and you’ll be safe,
they told me. Pull it
and everything will be okay.
From birthbed to deathbed wide eyes grow
tired and unfinished, losing focus,
seeing nothing
but the cloudy film
of their own decay. But in me
heartbeats thunder, the weather
never changes.
Better to just close my eyes,
meet the ground, fall
into it, through it, become a part of it.
Air is getting warmer now, earth wider—its vast arms
spread apart to take me in. I feel the sun
breathe hot on my face, the wind run fingers
through my hair. Grass is just below me, soil,
newly blossomed pinks and blues.
The baby cries, kicks; I close
my eyes and wait for the butterflies
to die, for our lies to transcend
into silence.
This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 7:03 pm and is filed under poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
