My history vetted

Happy Easter to everyone who celebrates. In honor of spring and Easter I have this picture of daffodils and a poem by Walt Whitman about them:

Daffodils (1804)

I WANDER'D lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretch'd in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

By William Wordsworth (1770-1850).

Here is what you can do with the poem. You can copy it and start collecting a poem a day or you can start writing your own poems each day. Either way, please share the poems you find here. That's what Poetry month is all about.:) If you copy it you can save it for Poem in Your Pocket Day,Thursday, April 29th when you slip a poem into the pocket of a loved one or good friend.

The prompt for today's poem is "History", so I focused on a situation that has been happening fairly regularly lately. How many of you have adult children who question your memories?

Mine does very frequently and I incorporated this experience into today's poem. This is a short post with only one poem, since I'm right on time now.:)

What I love about April as Poetry Month is being surrounded by poetry all month. Sometimes only a poem will do when you're writing and many times I have found I have written more than one about an experience. Poetry takes the images of a memory and translates it into mind pictures so we're taking and putting them into poetic images.:)

Here is my poem for today:

Memories

They creep into conversation
like today when I spoke of the first time
I ever cooked calamari
their slimy translucent grey bodies lay
on the counter with the eyes staring
antenna now useless protruding from their
heads. They didn’t look like the fried crispy
rings I had known.
In the middle of the memory she says
“No, that wasn’t when we were in Bedford.
It was in Long Island”
I questioned the memory, all the while knowing
she was wrong, but in the all knowing world of
a young adult woman not yet in her thirties
it was the truth for her.

Lately our truths seem to collide
as if she were searching through
my memories and deciding which were real
and I question each time wondering if she is right
knowing the memory is mine
held in my brain and lived viscerally,
How can she vet the memories I had before her?
She wasn’t there when I threw my wedding ring across
that parking lot in California.
or when I lost my tooth in Arizona.
She wasn’t there when I got the news my father died
on an April morning.

copyright 2010 by Barbara Ehrentreu