(no subject)

I've been thinking about how i rarely write poetry, so different from my younger years. I scribble still, scribbled for hours on the plane yesterday as i noted my observations with the time so today i can go find out a bit more about what i observed (confirming my guesses or not).

But it's not poetry.

I chatted with Christine about it. "If a picture is worth a thousand words...." "Photography is far more efficient...."

Yes, but, i thought, pondering that maybe i have decided my experiences are not remarkable enough to capture, not insightful enough to share. I hope it's that my expression is satisfied with photography, but i wonder if a change has happened. Maturity: when you realize that there isn't a need to share? When you realize the aches are not so bad? That the exquisite emotion is one of a million others?

This morning, waiting for my computer to start from its power-starved state, i walked to the bookshelf and grabbed a book of poetry, A Daughter's Geography from Ntozake Shange. Later, in the loo, i picked up Naomi Shihab Nye's Honeybee. Ntozake's words from 1983 still need to be heard. Naomi's witness to the violence in the middle east looses no poignancy when i realize she's not writing about last summer's violence.

But then there's a poem about Naomi's mother, baking, and i think of my mother working in a bakery too, in that flurry of empty nest, learn skills to escape, effort. Maybe poems about my mother is where my writing should be. I look at my sister's photos sent from Saint Patrick's day dinner and - oh, my parents look so old. But more than the aging that seems to have happened so quickly, is my emotional resonance with how my mother's face is stiff with the "I'm smiling for the camera" smile and her eyes have the tension and stress that never seems to ebb away. I don't think the camera communicates that outside of my history and experience. Words might. Maybe.