I don't think of myself as a writer of love poems. Yet, when I give my work some distance and look back at it, I see many poems are snapshots from a sliver of time when I gave myself completely to a moment. In these times that I am fully present with a family member, I feel an intimacy--a moment of love--that births a poem. Being with small children can lend itself to these moments. There is a chance to experience their sense of wonder, and to feel as though we are stealing time as I do in this poem:
While much of the world goes to work
I take my three-year-old to the park
She chases ducks
How they squawk and run
She laughs when they sink their beaks
Into their backs
She sits with them
Under a big oak
A breeze lifts off the water
And the sun makes the lake dance
She lets a worm crawl on her shoe
And up her leg
She wraps its body in knots
She wants to take it home
The worm lives here, I say
Let’s find a safe place for it
She hangs it from a pine branch
Bye-bye worm
She grabs my hand
And leads me laughing
To the car
I now see this poem about a day at the park with our three-year-old as a love poem. It is a love in many layers: her love of nature, my love of her sense of awe, and the love that is more gratitude for our moments together.
When I wrote the "Gratitude" page for my full-length collection Mother May I, which this poem is part of, I ended up feeling a strong sense of love for our family of four, a love for the ways they have changed, and will continue to change, me. I wrote my thanks to them, stating "This book was born from love of you."
