odditycollector

Oh, internet, how I have missed you this past small while!

As a returning present, here's a poem that used to travel around on the buses of my fair city.

 

This morning the children are at gymnastics,
ballet, sleepovers, and the house
is an empty city, pillaged and burnt.

Batman and Mr. Freeze lie facedown,
exhausted lovers. Early drafts of poems
now are overlaid with alphabet hieroglyphics,
lush red crayon, rows of A’s
radiating out to a cry.

Across the bay, snow gathers for winter.
The pale sea, cold as the sea
that argues against the jagged island
where I lived for thirty years
and is now a shape, pea-green and tiny
on my sons’ junior globe.

Look, there it is.
And all that blue is the ocean.

I tidy the strewn drawings,
find a shoe-box bed for the action heroes.
I slide open the doors to the garden,
its carpet of red leaves.
In England my mother would have had a bonfire,
pitched them on, wiping her eyes.
Here, I don’t know where they go.

--from Prime
by Miranda Pearson