Birth Of A Poet

I love poetry. Poetry is what I do. It is what I am all about. To me, poetry is word sound power.

I first realized that I really loved poetry in a high school english class. God bless Mrs. Edwards (no relation), the english teacher who promoted poetry, both written and spoken. She stood out mainly because she wore loud green dresses and brilliant red lipstick. That coupled with her naturally red hair, made her a sight to behold. It does't stop there...she spoke in a thick Bostonian accent with a lisp to boot! She was the butt of jokes on a daily basis. She got through to me, though.

When I was in high school, it wasn't all that cool to be into poetry. I only knew one other person in the entire school that ever expressed an interest poetry. Her name was Carol Brown. We would read poetry to each other and savor what was just heard.

During the time I was in the Navy, I would often receive mail from Carol that would inevitably have a poem in it. This made my endless days at sea bearable. When I returned home from the service, she had enrolled at UCSB in Santa Barbara. She invited me up from Los Angeles to visit not long after I got out. I remember so vividly when I arrived at her apartment and before I could set a foot inside, she handed me an album entitled "The Last Poets" and asked me if I had ever heard it. She played it for me...and I was completely blown away. The world suddenly made sense to me. I thought to myself, that's what I'm gonna do! I was 20 years old.

The first poem I ever wrote was entitled The Mirror. I wrote it to a lovely lady named Joyce. I was smitten with Joyce. She was simple, graceful and beautiful. Around Joyce, I always felt like Heathcliff in the novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. I felt like she was who I was, only female and in a body of her own. She was an enigma and she opened my mind to 'other' possibilities, even other worlds. But, as they say, if you love someone, let them go...if they return, beautiful. If they don't, that's beautiful too. Joyce was soon leaving the states, and me, to go to South America. It was the inspiration I needed to pen my first poem. I sealed it in an envelope and instructed her not to open it until she was aboard the airplane and speeding down the runway. And only then.

When she and I again made contact about a year later, it was via a telephone call. She was calling from the US Embassy in Chile. The phone call came to her sister and brother in law's home where I happened to visiting that fateful day. She had endured many things over the course of that year. Some very horrifying, to say the least. Yet,  when I spoke to her over many miles of phone line and major static, I could hear her in a faint voice saying over and over..."the mirror, the mirror, the mirror."

Need I say more?

 

 

 
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