POETRY ARRIVED LATE

POETRY ARRIVED LATE

     —after Neruda

Poetry arrived late 

and all out of breath, 

in search of me. 

But I didn't listen,

I had no idea that 

I was lost, or that 

I was bereft—without words. 

Images glimmered

on the far horizon 

like clouds thick 

with the promise of rain, 

and distant thunder pounding 

its own drum in dark canyons,

spoke of other things.

I was not yet schooled, 

words were not friends, 

they were elusive as hungry deer

in a land ravaged by drought,

and they carelessly abandoned me

much in the same way 

my parents did so long ago. 

But my grandmother 

took me firmly by the hand 

and she led me up the hill, 

pointing out the plants, 

naming the spring wildflowers

while the pines whispered old

secrets waiting for new words.

So I suppose poetry got a hold of me 

when I was young, almost a toddler, 

certainly before I was lettered. 

But then it lay dormant for decades 

like a manzanita, or a fire poppy seed 

waiting for the right wildfires to germinate,

and combust into the abyss 

of the mind. I was an imposter

dressed in other words and ideas

made of cheap velvet and cactus,

but poetry was patient. It waited 

for me to arrive—for decades 

before declaring itself an ally,

a lodestone. It became

a pathfinder with arrows 

made of leaves pointing 

the way back home

or was it the way forward—

a doppelgänger rebounding 

through distant canyons.

Poetry finding me here, now.

1/26/22 CPITS Write On! Terri Glass class