GoodReads

C's bookshelf: read

The Peculiar
Maggot Moon
Chime
Leviathan
The City and the City
Graceling
The Road
A Certain Slant of Light
The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer's Craft
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
Brown Girl in the Ring
Well Wished
The Innkeeper's Song
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
Beloved
American Indian Myths and Legends
The Left Hand of Darkness
The Return of the King
The Fellowship of the Ring
The Two Towers


C S Peterson's favorite books »

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

My Overactive Imagination

An homáge to Harold Monro and my Grandmother, Ruth


Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?
                                    I am eight years old living between
                                    Manhattan and mountains
Green glass, goblin.  Why do you stare at them?
                                    By all appearance an ordinary
                                    schoolgirl but I frighten my little friends
                                    ‘cause I know
Give them me.
                                    How to find real fairies in the garden
                                    flowers, how to find signs proving the
                                    frost witch has touched the maple leaves
No.
                                    My Grandmother reads me poems
                                    while I draw or comb my fingers through
Give them me. Give them me.
                                    My secret treasure box containing frosted
                                    bits of sea glass, green and blue, broken
                                    rhinestones and nuggets of gold and quartz
                                    my grandfather dug from the mountain’s heart                                            
No.
                                    Any small thing catches my eye –
                                    this could be it: the strange nickel that grants
                                    wishes, or the pebble from space that is really a
                                    telephone to the next galaxy, but no
Than I will howl all night in the reeds,
Lie in the mud and howl for them.
                                    I build goblins into the murky reeds of a drainage
                                    ditch and frighten myself while I search for
                                    young dragons                                                                     
Goblin, why do you love them so?
                                    I find a crack in the rocks by the trail and believe it
                                    a door into another world.  Isn’t that how the stories
                                    always start?
They are better than stars or water,
Better than voices of winds that sing,
Better than any man’s fair daughter,
Your green glass beads on a silver ring.
                                    How can this compare to reruns of Leave it to
                                    Beaver? Or Mayberry? My friends running home
                                    to canned laughter and TV trays
Hush, I stole them out of the moon.
                                    I’ll trade these any day for a journey to the moon,
                                    fishing with Winken Blinken and Nod, with
                                    Captain Kirk and Bilbo Baggins
Give me your beads, I want them.
                                    My Grandmother reads me poems,
                                    I hunger for them
No.
                                    Why do you plague me with grammar and spelling
I will howl in the deep lagoon
For your green glass beads, I love them so.
                                    My Grandmother reads me poems
Give them me.  Give them.
                                    Why do you burden me with
                                    the five-paragraph essay
No.
                                    My Grandmother reads me poems

1 comment:

  1. Katie-this is 'over-whelming'. I can't say the usual words like beautiful, because it really is more than that. I read it through several times, and I understand. It's your story of a magical childhood, more than what others took, because you had a grandmother who read poems and a grandfather who showed you most important treasures. (It's hard to put this into words!)

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