I was looking at this picture I took last week at the city park, and it brought to mind the very first poem I ever wrote.
I was about four, sitting on the old metal glider on my Granny’s front porch on Washington Street. (It’s now all boarded up and overrun by weeds.)
My inspiration was the huge oak tree in the front yard. Its roots have now swelled so that the sidewalk from the street to the porch (the one that seemed sooo long when we played Red Light, Green Light on it) has buckled beyond repair.
Here it is:
“A tree is beautiful, so big and high.
A tree is beautiful, so please don’t cry.”
Not exactly Pulitzer material there, but sweet. And it has poetic qualities: rhyme, repetition, meter. . .
I wonder now who was crying, or was in danger of crying. And exactly how I figured that the tree’s qualities would change anything.
Maybe it was just the nature-lover in me from the beginning. :P
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