Since the motivation for one of these poems stemmed from a previous post, I thought I'd bare my artistic soul and let you have a gander at my failings in verse.
The first was written several years ago, and is about my oldest son when he was four. We used to own this old white Escort wagon, and we had gone out somewhere, me in a hurry and him with a fist full of his little plastic dinosaurs.
I didn't want them scattered all over creation, and told him to leave them in the car. He put them on the dashboard.
Well, it was hot that day, and the windows were up.
The poignant moment for me wasn't that he cried when he saw that his dinos were now a multi-colored puddle of liquid plastic, but that it might have been sadness over the loss of the love he had invested in them. He really loved playing with those dinos. They were easily replaced at the dollar store, but the image stuck in my head for some reason and the poem wrote itself.
The second one is a collection of images from playing in the woods behind the house I grew up in with a childhood friend who died in his twenties under tragic circumstances. It is a memorial, in a way, of those happy days, still tinged with sadness that we so easily lose our childhood innocence.
See this?
