Learning to write

 

Learning to write

 

The house is fully furnished:

A mother, three kids and the TV;

The father is upstairs, attached to a guitar:

An intricate arrangement of strings and chords;

An intimate arrangement of bodies and words.

 

My hobby, he once declaimed,

Is not playing the guitar,

It’s learning to play the guitar.

Then he took himself off for a session.

A terse man, pithy under the skin.

Once, maybe twice,

He’d handed me the guitar

Like a baton, like a lesson.

I never learned. He never listened.

 

And so, only when the music stopped,

Was the poem written.

 

Now, sometimes, if I listen very hard

I can still hear the fingers at work:

The tiny metallic flowers blooming,

Filling the air; dandelion heads

Going to seed, wind-blown.

 

The time is always the same: too late.

This poem was initially inspired by Carolyn Kizer's Thrall. See the link below.

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/thrall-2/

The original of the picture above is by Regina Cassolo Bracchi.

For information about her see the link below.

https://www.gamec.it/en/regina-della-scultura/