Tonight I took the dog for a walk. There has been a real shift in the season from summer to fall. One minute I am playing in the sun with the kids, talking about walking the dog. I get my shoes on and fetch the lead only to find we are leaving in the dark. The air has a cool breath to it, which feels refreshing after a hot day at the fair. Peace surrounds me as I close the door on the shrieks of the children having their bath. Mumma loves this time. I wander down the street with dog, who loves to sniff. I’m not in a hurry so this doesn’t annoy me tonight, there is time, all is good. I look up to the sky and there is the moon in its glory. It is a striking sight and I wonder to myself “how on earth would you describe that moon?” “How do you try to capture that very moon on a page?” Doubt starts to rear its ever-present head, yes how would YOU describe that moon Caroline? You don’t have a vocabulary anywhere near extensive enough to capture what you see and there’s you wanting to write, ha! Pah!
There is, thankfully, another little voice that resides in my head. She starts to speak ever so quietly in my ear as my mean voice bangs on. “What would Jack say about that moon?” she asks, “How would a child describe it?” The voice is right, I don’t have to be a master of words, a professor of sentence structure I just need some words and a feeling, it will come.
I remember my boy this weekend, pulling up onto my lap as he was still in the process of waking up. He sits and inhales deeply. The boy has something to say, but he is 6 and still has to process it. There is a hold on the room. No point in helping or coaxing him, it will just drive him nuts. So I wait and I wait. His body jerks a bit as the words and the need to talk come before the air can reach his throat. His arms extend like a composer waiting for silence. Jack closes his eyes to speak and moving his hand on each word as they are punched out from his throat he says:
Christmas Lights
On
Fire
Lit
People outside
That is what
I saw
From my window
Last night
I don’t speak – but I smile. In just a few words he is sharing with me his delicious secret of spying on the neighbor’s party when he should’ve been fast asleep. He conjures up my own memories of doing exactly the same thing when I was a child and how much fun it was. I am thinking, I am remembering and I am realizing that my boy just made a poem!
Often jack will explain something he sees and I am gob smacked by the poetry of it. I need to write them down, I need to steal them, but I never have the pen and paper at the ready. I always hope I will remember, but like colic and learning to walk (well maybe not the colic), you never really do. So this was my son’s first poem and just the support I needed to carry on, plug away and write what I want to say, in the way I need to say it. I can’t let false pride and assumptions stop me from just keeping on doing, doing, doing. So ladies and gentlemen:
Tonight I walked the dog, as the moon burnt a hole in the dark night sky.
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