i swear all the birds will live until the end

38. A Preface to My Poetry; for my mother (a series of haikus)

some days i tell my mother about the poetry i'm writing, and i worry she sees only birds, where i drew us flying

Spoiler! :

39. i love poetry

Author's Note: Just like last year, and the year before, I'm ending my NaPo with a poem that uses at least one word from every person's NaPo thread title as my little tribute to all of you! Also unintentionally I am ending with 39 poems as I somehow also did last year, so might need to come back in May to do a little epilogue.

April rings differently this year, echoing
off key, for the first time in a generation,
arriving late through slanted sunbeams,
disconnected and wandering.
But this is how life goes now,
teetering between sickness
and love, recalling what is
still essential and remembering
how we're all connected in these
choices and snapshots of life,
despite feeling we are stranded
somewhere lost at sea, despite
the distance, distraction, dissociation,
we have chosen discourse here,
to dabble, and drabble in poetry.

April doesn't feel like spring this year,
or living new life, or resurrection,
even though we keep looking, and
asking where the gods are keeping it,
but they say nothing can stop the eventuality
of seasons changing and spring waits for no one,
so it's still national poetry month,
and we're turning this cluster of poems,
these scattered sticky notes posted to
golden canvasses into life, painting the
ashes torn right from the hearth and
the whisper of cigarette smoke
into living bird calls, pinning the leaves
back to the rowan trees and claiming
every star dropped from the sky,
because whether or not the world's ending
we'll write a new spring into existence,
we've decided to do this.

But how does one write poetry
in a pandemic, when it feels like
tacenda, little picayune snippets,
when these words feel weightless
against these fears no longer faceless?
Maybe we start out right where we are,
wherever life has come to revolve,
we record a transcript of the life
of an american teenager juxtaposed
to Caesar and Rumpelstiltskin,
weathered, yes, but still standing
somehow until we meet again
or until that last warring star dies,
we wake up at 3 am even though
we should be sleeping, and we
record what's on our heart,
we retell our favorite fairy tales
how they were meant to be heard,
we'll have a chat with the bees,
and try to tell them everything, and
when they don't want to hear us,
we write it down again just to be
included in something as simple
as a month of counting metre,
writing loose poetic fan fics,
or wedging your memories
between cheap software
forum spam, hoping it's not too late.

You know what, i swear i may have
lost by mind along the way,
but maybe this heart-willed
soul-dumping into NaPo forums,
is more significant than just words
retrieved wrinkled and unedited,
this naming of everything that's
happened, and everything we feel,
is not insignificant, after all there is power
in boulders and power in silk,
and the human language is one
of the only things that doesn't decay,
these ghost threads are going to be here
whenever spring decides to show up,
this computer ink has become blood,
become growing tree roots, has
lived in song and dance,
you know history is as much written
in hurried poetry, as in textbooks,
and some day when there's time
for peace, we might appreciate
how this tender self lived on, how poetry
revealed what we were looking for,
how we dared to imagine in the end
this April, that words might mean
something for the world.

Huge thank you to everyone of you that encouraged me this month with your comments, likes, prompts, or chats during poetry jams. I am so very very appreciative of you!

Note I revised the poem on 5/10 because I re-read it and realized I had left out several titles somehow? So hopefully everyone's in there now [sorry I think I might have mixed up my lists a bit in midst of copy-pasting].

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