Nom de Plume

I’ve been reading a lot about Poetry Friday on the blogs lately, in which bloggers post a poem written by someone else. How about Poetry Wednesday, in which we post a poem we wrote? Hey, there’s got to be some use for all the really bad poetry I’ve written that’s languishing on my hard drive. So I’ll start. Here goes:

The Last Trip

We hurtle to the coast
so a fierce tide
can pound transgressions
into something
fine and powdered
we can let glitter
through our fingers
tomorrow,
laughing in our castle—

its windows
freshly-washed.

Your hands
are steady on the wheel,
my eyes fixed
on scrubbed sandstone
until darkness washes us to
a silent shore,
where—in moonlit abeyance –
we pad past
salt-rippled sand,
crusted seaweed
trusting our breaths will hold
under the weight of
in-crashing waves—

their shimmering
collapse.

I couldn’t wait through the 345 holds at the library, so I went out and bought this–and then devoured it in a single (albeit late) night. I love Ann Tyler. She delves so deep into her characters that we end her novels feeling as though they are our friends, perhaps even our families. In Digging to America, she explores the relationships between the families of two couples who have adopted Korean babies. One is your quintessentially American family; the other is an Iranian family, who is, of course, quintessentially American in its own right. And that is the theme of the book. Although set in her usual Baltimore, this novel felt larger, more spacious than most of her other works. (This is an observation only, neither good nor bad.) As always, highly recommend.