Seeing Poetry I

I'm guilty of becoming blind to some things in my surroundings and not really seeing them. This piece of poetry has been hanging in our home for 12 years, but thankfully, some spring cleaning and dusting this weekend served to make me notice, read, truly see, and remember all the surprise and joy it brought me back in 2003.

Ryan wrote this as a school assignment back in sixth grade. His teacher was taken with the imagery, submitted it to Creative Kids magazine, and he became a published author. I remember reading this for the first time and shedding some tears myself, thankful for being able to see things through his eyes, and that he could describe a perfectly average scene from his window so beautifully. I'm not impartial in any way, but I do love this poem. In honor of National Poetry Month, my oldest poet son who still has a way with words, the fact that the gutter is no longer filled with white flakes, and that I actually did some spring cleaning (but his window is still speckled with smudges of dirt), I'm sharing:

 Gutter Filled With White Flakes

Gutter filled with white flakes as they billowed out-

ward, roof dappled with melting snow. I sat watching

 birds. By chance, I saw them, flooding by like water in

 the rapids, rippling, fluttering about madly as dragon- 

flies. Small, dark, brown birds with tan flecks all down

their bodies ending in bristled curls on their tails. One

halted its skyward ascent to sit on the edge of the

snow-filled gutter. A twig snapped above the bird's

head and plummeted. The bird, startled, slapped its

wings and gracefully soared away from its certain peril. 

One bird gone, yet another replaced it almost immedi-

ately, squatting down, making itself look ever more

pudgy, so pudgy in fact, that I almost had to laugh. 

That bird's visit, too, was cut short. A heavy truck rum-

bled down the road startling the bird, it drove onward 

in its trek to an unknown destination. A cardinal sits

on a tree branch, tree's trunk striped with ribbons of

rolling droplets as if in tears, weeping with sorrow 

at the cardinal's departure. As the smudges of dirt with 

which my window is speckled begin to cloud my view, 

I begin to slip into the world of knowingness. I turn

away, in tears, vowing to look back on this day and

behold again all the glory and peace it brought.