poetry tuesday: news story

I've been working on today's poem for about a week...but it's not finished. (See yesterday's post.) But yesterday's Monday Mission, to write a post in the form of a news story, somehow connected my brain to a period of time when everything I wrote was a reaction to things I saw on the television or on my computer screen. I was a junior in college. I hadn't been writing poetry very long (less than a year), but already I was trying to work out craziness by writing poems.

Late March, 1999: Three U.S. soldiers went missing on the Yugoslav-Macedonia border.

April 1, 1999: Yugoslavia displayed the three captured soldiers, battered and bruised.

April 20, 1999: The Columbine massacre.

There were other things; a train was shot by a missile and at least ten people died, a truck full of refugees was accidentally bombed, thousands of refugees searched for safety. And much more, these are just the images I remember. It seemed to me that the world was just turned upside down.

And so I wrote. A lot.

Here are a couple of the poems.


I close my eyes and still see the three bruised faces from CNN Headline News

I want to throw my
glass at the wall and

watch it shatter into
seventeen hundred tiny

diamonds. I glare
at one cat when

he attacks
the other. And

the sun
shines.

April 1999


I want to write about how I feel but I don't know how

Thousands of
people, stacked

legos, create an
alien

landscape. A child
sprouts from the

soil, reaching
for sunlight, water, the

chance to
grow.

April 1999


There were more, many more. But that's a taste. This post wasn't exactly what I'd planned...hopefully I can have a new poem for next week.

*******

By the way, the Little Mister is feeling better. He's finally eating. He's still sleeping a lot, but when he's awake he's more alert and much happier.