This last summer, as a galley hand aboard the Victory Chimes (a bittersweet experience, being the vessel’s likely last time ever as a windjammer), I had the wonderful experience of being able to share my poetry, to read it aloud and to explain its themes and personal meanings, in ways that had never presented themselves to me before.
This is a poem of gratitude for two of the other crew members most involved with providing me the welcome and the opportunity to open up. One was the first person to really ask me questions excitedly about my poems, to pick up on the layered imagery in an engaged way; the other became my collaborator and an inspiration for writing outward facing, humorous poems (as opposed to reflective introspectives which have ever been my forte) and read poems of mine aloud. The memories I have of sharing poetry with them are among some of my fondest; not just of the season, but of my entire life.
What this commemorates directly is the fact that these two each, themselves, ended up writing a poem wholly independent of my collection. I’ve transcribed this and sent copies in the mail (today) to them. An analogy that occurred: poetry is, in a way, my form of sign language. It allows me to express and articulate my internal life (my soul, if I may be permitted a philosophical grandiosity) in ways that I find difficult or impossible to do in speech. And when they wrote poems to do the same thing, it was like encountering another human being speaking my native language, for the first time in 33 years of life.
So, thank you, Celia and Kate, sincerely. And thank you to the crew in its entirety: to Katey for letting me read to them in the galley, for Ava’s touching appreciation of how much it meant to me to read to that collection of ladies after I had read at their memorial service, to Cap for loving The Captain’s Knack, to Tripp for being able to accept the sentimentality of The Two Busiest Guys, to Aaron and Meghan for their kudos, to Carolyn and the ladies who let me read my intimate thoughts aloud for close to two hours one evening, and for the band and passengers at Rising Appalachia.
Reading Notes
Surface: The imagery and metaphor is straightforward. I was solitary tree, the flowers were my poems. They are like two saplings, with their bright leaf apiece being their own poems, akin to the ones in my canopy.
Depth: The tree metaphor threads to two other poems: I use it for Celia’s personal growth in 109. If I Only Had a _______ and the alder symbol is a specifically important one in my life covered in 49. Eulogy for an Alder about a sapling I left to grow as a young teenager.
Lines 7 & 8: A little bit of melancholy about the experience of head-patting I’d get in younger years for writing poetry. It was nice to be complimented, don’t get me wrong. But having people be engaged is definitely preferable.
Hermit Thrush 