Poem a Day #3

A Kind of Courage

 

What kind of courage is it?

The anxious, scary kind,

the pottery on her aunt’s shelf in turquoise blue

chipped on the rim, well-worn and loved

through three generations and now you are responsible

for keeping it safe, handling it to save your life.

 

What kind of fool takes their life

and leaps into their unfamiliar? It’s

a congested kind of dust responsible

for new allergies, a woman who never knew the kinds

of desert plants that would settle her into love

of chamisa, blooming yucca, cactus, pinon, juniper and that incredible blue

 

sky, blue hovering sadness, blue

disappearing into the Great Lakes. Her life

out of the fog of waiting. How she loved

seeing Dad at the kitchen table, six am, it

was him alone, eating breakfast cereal, kindness

in his hands as she joined him, responsible

 

for getting up for school, responsible

with Mom and brother still in bed, her blue

eyes join his dream world of the working trucks, kinds

of home calling her away even then. Life

someday giving her offices, cubicles, typewriters, it

never stopped with just carbon paper and blue stencils loved

 

by her Mom’s church secretary upper office, love

of the smell of mimeographed bulletins responsible

for news and prayer chains and the next holy season, it

churns them out around the wheel of yellow, blue,

purple, pink and red.  She waits for her life

to arrive at the front steps, waits for the boy on the motorcycle, kind

 

of coming to pick her up, where they kind

of talk and lay down in the green park grass where love

eludes her young body this time. Life

will grow on in years, waiting to be responsible

for her own wedding crystal, her own blue

sky over her grandmother’s lost grave in Iowa, it

 

takes her prairie life and leads her.  A kind

of courage, it gives her love of the wind,

her response to chipped blue pottery.

 

I started this sestina in last week's sestina class that I am teaching to six wonderful sestina troubadours in Albuquerque. We are in week 5 of 6.  We did a writing exercise about how we felt in the moment. I started with "How do you feel right now?" and we wrote several one-word descriptions.  One of mine was 'courage.'  We then added an object that represented one of the feelings.  I looked around the room and saw Lauren's beautiful pottery displayed on her dining room wall shelf. Something about the pottery, the question and the way the sestina wraps me into it's form, pulling out things that I never knew were there, took me onward.  I wanted to start with the question and wrote the first stanza.  After that, it's that sestina magic that kept me going.