More Places for Poems to Hide

I wrote another poem about where poems hide. This time I did it in an even more annoying way that isn't even remotely visually appealing. Sorry, but it's more fun to write that way, so you'll really have to earn it if you want to read it.

Just like the one I posted on Dec. 6th, this poem was inspired by "Valentine for Ernest Mann" by Naomi Shihab Nye. Another of my favorite poems by her is "Making a Fist". I think it illustrates beautifully how inspiration can hide in the most unexpected of places. In this case, from a comment her mother made when she was only seven.

Making a Fist

Naomi Shihab Nye, 1952

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,

I felt the life sliding out of me,

a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.

I was seven, I lay in the car

watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.

My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

“How do you know if you are going to die?”

I begged my mother. 

We had been traveling for days.

With strange confidence she answered,

“When you can no longer make a fist.”

Years later I smile to think of that journey,

the borders we must cross separately,

stamped with our unanswerable woes.

I who did not die, who am still living,

still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,

clenching and opening one small hand.

Author Neil Gaimen, said, "You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it." It's about paying attention when the ideas show up.

I love this picture of Naomi Nye. Doesn't she just look like she knows something we don't?