the boy who gave me writing
(being prose bordering on poetry)
my mother’s penmanship was the practised grace of her generation.
styled the way she was taught as correct, a smooth flight of pen, letter into letter, like a swan might move tracing curves of a creek. maybe that’s what was taught as an expectation of proper hand movement for a young woman then.
maybe it was meant as a sign of obediance and acceptance within the greater whole – how, as they say, to rightly behave. I some so surmise as that’s what they tried to teach me in my schooling too.
they tried. tried and failed.
mother took it inside, becoming another right hand, part of knowing who she was – to us who read her mothered pen, yet more, to herself as well. even the secretarial short-hand she later learned to craft – it carried the same regard.
not me.
oh, I learned, my writing was good and proper enough, I passed my grades, but it never belonged to me. their pen, their paper, their script in shallow heart.
seventh or eighth grade says the clock, and Larry Mukai, that was the name. my best friend. of rather few those days.
left-handed he was. me, nothing in particular – stew. so I wanted with all my intent – be like Larry, write like Larry. I trained my right-handed me to write inside a left slanted stroke, falling the way his did naturally. I became second-nature to my intent. no labor at all.
yet it was still the shell for that unwelcomed school-taught-script. still not me. ask, and I wouldn’t have said, but the feeling was true.
maybe it was some meteorite of fallen far space, too slight to draw a crowd, yet still, landed in my finger-tips, made an accident of purposeful result. there was probably a sign, forgotten now.
building under construction, fingers being counted still, results uncertain yet. watch your step!
inside that mystery, script turned to block print, lord knows precisely why, with only a hint remaining to tracks in the sand. now an upright block script that runs near so swift as anyone’s hand.
there’s the hearth, the fire, the pen come home, albeit two steps to the left of expected perhaps, and said with some slight glancing grin.
and now this day, these shapes retain their stance.
neil reid © june 2012
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bearly audible 
Natural observations, pt.1, notes
Posted in Commentary, Draft, Writing Prompts on 17 October 2012| 5 Comments »
Pre-analytic observations taken from a hard stone perch
(not a poem, but observational notes)
There’s the rhythmic low splashing chorus of reflected sea bay waves some fifty feet to my right.
Sitting on stone cobbled aggregate uncomfortably below knee-high, then swing one then two legs over the land bound side, feet anchoring to one point of the breakwater boulders below.
Facing away from the shoreline to a cleft in a rising bluff, a large long grown shrub now centered in middle view.
Sounds begin to change my ear. Voices easy to ignore. Voices with wings.
Dense green foliage as a crown gives shuttered view to the spider-web of sheltered branches within its skirt. As a dress blown aside, limbs are more exposed lower and to the right, three-some feet below the summit rock wall.
Air drops away beneath.
Sporadic gull squawks clamor for attention, but there’s a lower ground of voice and wings scattered about and many within that green.
Small of voice yet swiftly crisp, focus gathers close. Swift and brief as is their flight from out the hidden core of limbs, then too seeing leaves shimmer in response to their returning roost.
First one then another, another, then add one more. Maybe a tribe of ten, maybe twenty inside that unkempt resting nest.
Each in turn makes a three-quarter elliptic flight out then back, unhesitant. Maybe one-second’s thought of flight. Small brown mostly body, yet a wide fore to tail bar of white held in private on the earth-side of each wing. A stoke or two of wings and the task of flight is untied, back on a hidden limb.
neil reid © october 2012
comments:
Not a poem. Obvious? Just some ribbon of observations. While the prompt suggested multiple visits to some specific place, work and the season drew more limits than I’d expected. So this is just “something”, or “whatever”, which so ever you choose. While the suggested observation wasn’t suggested to be “about” any one thing in specific, because of what I’ve been reading of late, yes, for me the real focal place was about birds. And yes, there were more birds all about than I would normally notice, most of them being less raucous then what more easily draws attention away.
Written for the We Write Poems prompt #127, take some time to simply observe a natural setting. Read the prompt for more detail if you wish.
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