BURNING



Friday, right before my boy-o came home from school with a raging migraine, I huddled down against the chill of the air on the porch with my notebook and challenged myself to write five American Sentences (seventeen syllables only) in five minutes...inspired by this new website and my previously-established obsession with poetry. In one moment, I was an inferno of Autumn color, in the next--a mother hurrying off to round up my hurting son. Once upon a time ago in the very recent history of me, these two callings--the one to put words on a page and the one to create and then raise children seemed to clash. I was forever feeling like a mother pregnant with unwritten lines or like a poet with waiting children...until I just decided to drop the labels. I realized this with deeper clarity on Friday when I saw that the writing was also the nurturing and the act of covering my child with a blanket and rubbing his temples and wrists with essential oil to ease his pain was the poem. So here are my five five-minute sentences...written in a moment when I dared to look nakedly at the outside all around me.

11.16.07--Tree softly changing, flames licking a golden heart, bold transformation.
11.16.07--Trees burning outside, riot of crimson longing, my heart the dark flame.
11.16.07--"You have to let go," this, what Autumn trees tell me, yellow leaf falling.
11.16.07--Color shows herself again, scarlet and gold truths, can't hide myself now.
11.16.07--There is something here, within this blazing halo, answering embers.