Incidents of History in Poetry
Jill Hand
We sat, our legs folded like soft pretzels, around a blue rug stained with years of smeared crayons and first-grade-fingers. Eyes as wide as the circumference of the art table, Mrs. B reads to us the poetic rhymes of Shel Silverstein and laughter bubbles around the room until it floats out the door and through the halls, lost between the shuffle of math equations and scientific formulas. This is my first bite of poetry and the taste tingles on my tongue until it settles like dust in the gaps between my baby teeth. I start to see the world in rhymes. Green Eggs and Ham is my favorite recipe. I over indulge until it loses its taste and in third grade try something new for the very first time: haiku. Five-seven-five. It’s not my favorite but it’ll have to do. Too many rules and not enough rhymes. Counting syllables tastes like metal and I crave something sweeter, a little less rigid and a lot more colorful. So I return to Silverstein and write some rhymes about school lunch-- something about how the hot dogs are rubber and the meat tastes like blubber. I read it to my class and liked the sound of their giggles. It earned a red ribbon from Mr. S, but the lunch lady forgot to smile. In seventh-grade I decided I liked writing short stories and abandoned poetry beneath the yellow slide on the elementary school playground. When it finally found me again in high school, I ran far as if it had been an old foe instead of a friend. It had grown and shifted to sonnets and epics. I did not recognize it, nor did I want any part of its post-puberty, pimpled face. The thought of even attempting to taste it again made me sick. It wanted me more than I wanted it and it rudely forced itself past my lips and settled onto my tongue, jamming down my throat until I could no longer breathe. I gasped, clinging to my literature and hiding behind fiction until one day prose introduced itself to me and I remember what it felt like to fall in love.