~ The Poet's Place Cafe~

When I first heard the Pulitzer poet Lisel Mueller recite her poem When I Am Asked on a radio show I immediately fell in love with her voice and her style in that poem. We learn in many ways including copying and I have fallen into the groove of Lisel Mueller many times writing.

Here and for one more time I will attempt to put her style and my experience in life together in a poem.

First for;
When I Am Asked.

When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.

It was soon after my mother died,
a brilliant June day,
everything blooming.

I sat on a gray stone bench
in a lovingly planted garden,
but the day lilies were as deaf
as the ears of drunken sleepers
and the roses curved inward.
Nothing was black or broken
and not a leaf fell
and the sun blared endless commercials
for summer holidays.

I sat on a gray stone bench
ringed with the ingénue faces
of pink and white impatiens
and placed my grief
in the mouth of language,
the only thing that would grieve with me.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I could never capture that expression of writing in grief.
I can feel some attributes in her voice.
That is what I try and write from.
That is what I try and duplicate but only in the appropriate places.

The title; it starts with the word When.
That is my ear call and sets my mood.

When I Looked UP

It was a quiet midsummer evening.
The brook off my back porch
was moving slowly
unlike the water rats
that were dodging my darts,
a favorite pastime.

I looked up at the frenzy
of swallows
in their erratic craziness
catching and swallowing
the unaware flying insects,
the consumption of the multitudes.

I looked up at my lamp
and could feel myself smiling
and consumed the vision
until it swung out from my pen
like a child in a playground
fresh and innocent
and I wrapped my words
around that child.
It was my very first escape.