Poetry Friday

Poetry_FridayMaybe it’s because my parents are getting older, but I’m beginning to see how a life can become filled with all sorts of chance events, momentary happenings that fall and drift like snow. As it turns out, some of these things that happen…well…you don’t notice them much, and, of course, they are too numerous to report; some of them you recognize as important from the get-go; and some of them take awhile to sink in, you have to look backwards in a mirror to see their meaning, to construct a story about how you got to where you got. Maybe you understand what I mean.

This poem emerged from thinking about my father’s diagnosis of melanoma and my mom’s cancer diagnosis. Both are doing well now, but the collision of events like these does cause me to consider that I am here, with them, at this moment. I need to make the most of it because time flies…

Like an Arrow

You are here.
–Anonymous, stairwell map, St. Joseph’s Hospital

You are here
next to a spider fern,
sweating silently in
a green vinyl armchair.

You are here
by the large window
that opens to shadowed
gray two-story concrete walls.

And through one gap—
the top of a crane,
a truck’s right front fender,
an orange plastic mesh fence.

You are here when
a June-bright sun-ray
glances precisely off
the windshield

of a white Toyota
momentarily framed
by the window’s
aluminum side jambs,

a sharpness that arrives
in one brilliant instant,
causing you to
blink back a tear.

And though you don’t remember,
you were there,

younger, invulnerable, powerful,
wiping the sweat from your damp brow
with your hayfork hand
in the wind and shimmer of mid-summer.

Yes, you were there
when, like an arrow
from an adept archer,
a photon barely nine minutes old

sliced through ninety-three
million miles of cold space
and the outer layers of skin
on your right arm.

Its dying energy
gouged a chunk
from the DNA of a
single skin cell.

At that moment
a future unchained.

It would take us
the next twenty years
to understand
what just happened.

© Steve Peterson

For lots of Poetry Friday poems by lots of different folks, please visit Read, Write, Howl.

16 thoughts on “Poetry Friday

    • Thank you, Margorie! Yes, they are doing pretty well, now, which is a huge relief for all of us. However, getting older is pretty tough stuff. I’m just glad we can talk about all this openly. That’s a gift.

    • Thank you so much for noticing those lines, Robyn! I think I was searching for a Frankenstein-esque image and had hoped it worked. And, yes, my folks are doing well right now, though, there’s something about cancer that sits in the back of one’s mind; it takes some energy to NOT let it take over…

      Thank you SO MUCH for your wonderful poems, and for hosting Poetry Friday.

  1. Wow. I didn’t really get what you were talking about in the introduction, that looking backward to find out what this moment means, but your poem really does that. Really.

    I love the reminder that “You are here.” Even though the “theres” we have been are just as important, and make us who we are.

    • Thank you for reading this poem, Mary Lee. I’m glad that you noticed the switch from “here” to “there” and that the poem conveyed a sense of trying to piece together a story from a bunch of fragments.

      Also, I just have to say that I am a HUGE FAN of you and Franki, and have been for some time. Keep up the great work. You are greatly appreciated.

    • Thanks very much, Laura. I appreciate the comments about what worked for you. It’s still in that (perpetual) revision stage, so your thoughts are very important to me.

      I stopped by your blog the other day and was intrigued by the 15 word challenge. I’m trying to write one now…but…er…it’s harder than I thought!

  2. A poem for a poem yours and this post reminded me of:

    Winter Happiness
    by Jack Gilbert

    Pride, pride, pride, pride, pride,
    pride and happiness. Winter
    and empty fields and beyond the trees
    the Aegean. The night sky
    bright in the puddles of this lane.
    Such dear loneliness. Going along
    to no man’s clock. No one who knows
    my middle name for a thousand miles.
    Thinking back to childhood. Astonished
    that I could find the way here.

    • Wow! Thanks! I love “and happiness” after all those prides. And the astonishment. I know that feeling, of being visited by the moment; I’ve been to that land and am slowly learning to speak the language (‘though it takes a lifetime to really learn it, I suppose.) Thanks so much.

      And now, one back at ya, ’cause one poem deserves another.

      WINTER: TONIGHT: SUNSET
      by David Budbill

      Tonight at sunset walking on the snowy road,
      my shoes crunching on the frozen gravel, first

      through the woods, then out into the open fields
      past a couple of trailers and some pickup trucks, I stop

      and look at the sky. Suddenly: orange, red, pink, blue,
      green, purple, yellow, gray, all at once and everywhere.

      I pause in this moment at the beginning of my old age
      and I say a prayer of gratitude for getting to this evening

      a prayer for being here, today, now, alive
      in this life, in this evening, under this sky.

      PS. Probably not many trailers with pickups in the yards in your town, but…there are other accumulations of a life lived well and/or hard, I’m sure! Happy holidays to you, and all the best for a year of wonder ahead.

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