Horray for Poetry

It’s National Poetry Month, which I learned from reading Inktopia and Evenshine.  As a show of solidarity, I thought I would post one of my favorite poems.  This one haunts me.  It never seems to let me go, and I would like to learn to write like that.

 

Siren

By Amy Gerstler

 

I have a fish’s tail, so I’m not qualified to love you.

But I do. Pale as an August sky, pale as flour milled

a thousand times, pale as the icebergs I have never seen,

and twice as numb- my skin is such a contrast to the rough

rocks I lie on, that from far away it looks like I’m a baby

riding a dinosaur. The turn of centuries or the turn

of a page means the same to me, little or nothing.

I have teeth in places you’d never suspect. Come. Kiss me

and die soon. I slap my tail in the shallows- which is to say

I appreciate nature. You see my sisters and me perched

on rocks and tiny islands here and there for miles:

untangling our hair with our fingers, eating seaweed.

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