As host yesterday, I also got to read from teacher writers across the nation and leave feedback on how they poetically responded. It made for a long, productive day with a break to go to my office and another to fetch a burrito.
Humming
~b.r.crandall
At first it was childhood,
Utica greens & chicken riggies,
the songs of an empty refrigerator box
becoming a castle radiant enough for sister Queens…
…a time for learning puppy breath on cold, linoleum floors
and finding warmth wrapped in towels after a day of swimming ---
(when she waved willow branches to swat porch flies
while the stars bathed in the lake).
I see the sun and the sun sees me.
Я бачу сонце, і сонце бачить мене.
We buzzed along mental maps of Cherry Heights,
peddling ten-speeds in high tops,
feathering hair with wiffleballs & pig skins,
telling truths and daring one another
with Milwaukee’s Best stolen from a father’s fridge.
This before I found silence as a lonely Londoner -
before the Danish winds taught me to sip Tuborgs in a skurvogn,
smukke solnedgange langs fjorden,
& to maneuver my mouth like a magpie:
Pen Oos, Vahgeena,
Ah Noos, & Svinek Ter
Walking along Beargrass Creek
I learned to fiddle with Kentucky bluegrass,
the stories of room 301,
Tommy Tuesdays, David Dursdays - the miracle of Brown.
And would one day get used to hiss-snakes
in the wood piles that humored my doctoral studies,
(needing that sanctuary of an Amalfi-drive pool).
These days, the simplicity of a blanket matters most,
times when the light teases the dog curled besides me
with the hymnals she sings through whimpers…
And I find myself humming, too,
about being harbored…to finally have a home…
…even as monsters set out to destroy them.
