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LOSING AND FORGETTING ARE SIBLINGS
by April Halprin Wayland
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As I sit on this cold, stone bench,
As I sit on this cold, stone bench,
Losing slinks up to my backpack,
puts her slim arm around its broad shoulder and whispers,
“Want to come over to my place, Handsome?”
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How could it resist?
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But just then, Forgetting saunters up to my brain,
lifts it off, sends it off to camp.
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lifts it off, sends it off to camp.
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And as the bus comes, as I stand up to board it,
Forgetting says, “Wow—those jeans are a tad tight.
Did you really need the pistachio frozen yogurt last night?”
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while my backpack sits on the bench, alarmed.
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(c) 2011 April Halprin Wayland, all rights reserved
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The story behind the poem:
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I was brooding about a critique I’d gotten. My mind was wandering, wondering: if my main character has these flaws, do I, too? I was also tired—we were flying back to L.A, so I had to get up early, pack, and catch BART to get to the airport.
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A half-hour into the BART trip, the station agent in Berkeley phoned my cell. They had my backpack. I hadn’t even noticed it was gone. Where was my brain?
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Riding back to retrieve my pack, I tried to find the lesson. The lesson for me is to stay present. I hadn’t been present. I took out my notebook.
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As I wrote, two abstract concepts developed personalities. The poem became lighter and it was fun to write. And guess what? Nothing was missing from my backpack!
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It’s your turn. In her book, Poem-Making, Ways to Begin Writing Poetry, Myra Cohn Livingston writes that personification “assigns human qualities to something that does not, in reality, have these characterisitics.” Think of an inanimate object. Or think of a vague concept, as I did. Write a poem using personification.
