Not anymore, not for a while. It stared when I was about 14 and from then on it seemed like I couldn't stop. The peak of my poetry fetish was while I worked at the Salt Lake City airport, and I would write 2-3 every day. One time I took out all my albums and counted how many there were--over 700.
I found this one today in one of my desktop files. It was for a poetry class that I took here at BYU-Idaho. I don't remember what grade it got or my teacher's comments. But I do remember that it was one of the last poems I wrote, and that was nearly 3 years ago. Maybe I should start up again.
Lindsey Judkins (my maiden name...I wasn't yet married)
English 352- Poetry
May 4, 2008
The Classified Connotation of Poetry
It was her Inspiration-
the science of not knowing anything commonly known at all,
of being downwind from perfect cherries unfolding into roses,
bruised from their dispassionate thorns but learning still the process-
every “how to” and “how come” before the age of sixteen.
It was Her- thinking in colorful metaphors and lyrics
and figures and sounds…releasing the cares of the day-
embedded in others’ dreams so pleasingly near-
alone in the deepness of self-
the river’s whispered lullaby her only consolation.
To her, it was Martha May nibbling on dry toast-
with eighty year-old lips and yellowed bones,
and giant tears falling feebly on the grained bread
as photographs on the far wall slid sideways and swung-
frames featuring her beloved’s eyes that sparkled with tease.
It was woven baskets of oranges resting sweetly
below the white blossomed trees across the lawn-
their smells drifting across young Thomas’s face…
when, in that moment, he thought he tasted heaven
and so knelt over the oranges to offer his first prayer.
In a sense it was every first sound dreaming
of a newborn child, from the first second of moving blood
within their delicate bodies- flushed and warm and
breathable-
like their mother before.
For her satisfaction, it was the morning melody of a crow-
its black feathers fluttering as eager eyelashes overhead,
while the spiders scattered into dark clumps of dust through the field
because dewdrops like grenades slipped faster down slippery weeds
onto their death-calling terrain.
Once, it had been the stifled screams of her little town
underneath the helicon of a hospital wing-
how they blended into the diamond lights below
as she took another swig of sea salt and Jone’s,
believing the noise would catch her fall.
Then, how could it not be the bristle-haired beast
howling and pounding in sorrow
against a fruitless earth that leaves its cubs
to starve on their hunger-
or flocks of black umbrellas
shielding a lusterless city’s criminal acts of sin?
Perhaps the spouting showers of golden ashes
that glow so prettily in the forest’s moonlight
with the careless, youthful kick of a worn shoe-
perhaps that is it…
Even lines of roaring engines ripping down
European trails into the most brilliant dusk
while one balloon that forgot to grip
onto its possessor’s sticky apple wrist
floats easily overhead and wins the race.
So much depends upon the perception of beauty-
Our God-given feel for song in tragedy abounding all over;
and so what will depend upon a connotation?
Poetry is,
to her and to Martha and to the raging animals,
a scene of natural Discovery-
left at last to be the minute hand
ticking
and ticking away
heartbeats in a timeless realm-
as the final constellation
existing in the expanse of
space that was never space,
opening wounded doubts to
enlarge the un-knowing and
clarify
the Imagined.
