Floodlights
3/1/2020
"Floodlights" was inspired when the musical "Wicked" came to the Koger Center. While the performances were here, I walked past the Koger Center with a loved one every night. The green floodlights set up around the building left a deep impression on me, and I captured the feeling with this poem.
Green light washes over the wall
While you and I thread through an eager throng Folks come and go for fourteen days
Till the show packs up and goes away.
Away with the show go the green oodlights And the initial white light, once a familiar sight, Strikes oddly.
Weeks later, the bare whiteness still recalls
The green glare of nights long gone
If you, beloved, should ever vanish away
My colorless days will still remember your verdant ray.
Return to a Child’s Mind
3/12/2019
It was the first time I had looked around my backyard after years of shutting myself indoors studying ... the backyard was my playground as a child, and I had to let out some of the nostalgia through writing!
A seventeen year-old girl in grey sweatpants walks across her peeling brown porch. Looking out into the yard, she searches earnestly for her childhood in sparsely flowered trees and splotchy grass. Where are the striped caterpillars and redbud pods that were once her playmates? The wind flocks to her, siing the blanket of black hair that shrouds her slumbering memories. Suddenly, those memories awaken and wiggle free, turning the wind into a sea-breeze. The vinyl house becomes a ship, and the girl leans over the deck railing to stare into the grassy ocean. Her grey pants are now a white dress, which ruffles in the wind as she watches mermaids basking in the evening sun. Perhaps the mermaids are only crude trees struggling out of their winter prison... but that does not matter. The girl only sees purple-pink blossoms ornamenting their heads.