The Blue of a Heart before Forgetting, For dVerse poets

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The Blue of a Heart before Forgetting

First thing in the morning, when I’m fresh from dreams,
your memory cuts so sharply through the day’s beginning that I wake.
Once, in that long dream of childhood­­, days were not over half so soon.
Early in September, below the slippery slide,
the steady beat of dribbling basketballs.
So many acts of bravery lost—
“Annie I Over” and “New Orleans.”
Way back in our salad years,
it was so very easy to trap wonder in a box.
The dominoes going head to toe.
All those nights of passion, those years spent in desire.
More in the air than possibility.
You would think there would be some remnant left.

Enough, I say!
It was the beginning of the end.
I’m counting steps from one to ten across my heart, then back again.
What you blindly get into in youth can be the end of you.
I must ask, is it me alone—
this bald horizon line, the teeth of far-off cliffs?
The tide comes in each morning.
That isn’t my heart beating with wild abandon.
I scream, I cry, I moan, I curse.
The rain is falling drop on drop.
All day long, the rain comes down,
writing this poem with water on cobblestones.

The moon like an animal hovers over and around our houses.
My life catches in its static house.
I am an ally of the truths that lie the whole world over,
though some of them are ill-begotten.
Since it is true, I must report.
Every day since birth, I have been emptying the cup.
My past drifts away from me.
I seem to fit my life now. I’m cozy in my skin.
Is it gain or loss to feel contentment?
A woman should be shrouded, silent, pregnant, dumb.
You crane your necks and stand and gawk.
Clap hands, you say, Clap hands to the music.
The act of creation is the greatest art.

 

For dVerse Poets, we were to make a poem from the first lines of one poem we published each month in 2023.  Finding it almost impossible to sort through over a thousand posts made in the past year, I instead went through my file where some poems from past years are filed alphabetically. Selecting some poems from poem files A to D, I recorded first lines that seemed  to be possible lines in a poetic compilation, then set about reordering them.  This is the poem I came up with.  The lines are exactly as they were in the 40 poems I borrowed the first lines from. The only changes made concerned punctuation and capital letters. The title is also from a first line.

To read other poems written to this prompt, go HERE.

16 thoughts on “The Blue of a Heart before Forgetting, For dVerse poets”

  2. Kim of Glover Gardens

    So many of these lines are standalone profoundness!
    “Once, in that long dream of childhood­­, days were not over half so soon.”
    “What you blindly get into in youth can be the end of you.”

    And many more. And then there are the phrases that make me bitterly jealous that I didn’t write them:
    “the teeth of far-off cliffs” and
    “writing this poem with water on cobblestones”.

    And finally, the ending is a crescendo.

    Awesome poem!

    Like

    Reply ↓
    1. lifelessons Post author

      Thanks, Kim. Didn’t realize until after I’d refiled all the poems that I was supposed to put links to them. All of them aren’t in my blog but most are but to refind their place in 40 poems is not on my agenda. I don’t think most would look up the entire poems anyway…do you agree? Thanks for the wonderful comment…

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply ↓
  3. Sherry Marr

    First, I LOVE the title! And “it was so easy to trap wonder in a box.” A truly enjoyable poem to read and envision. I know what you mean about scrolling back. I write so many, then forget them.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

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