handslive

It's that time of year and I've started biking again. Second day out, it was spitting a little on the way in. Just enough to dampen my toes. And then the central image of one of my "missing" bike poems came to me. I'd determined that I should just wait it out and my subconscious would eventually do the work. Sure enough! :-)

My mom wrote a little travelogue piece for a local paper about the rafting trip my parents and one sibling took last year. She included a poem largely written on the trip. I've known since I was quite young that she could string together a thoroughly competent essay, so the piece in the paper was exactly what I expected. It was also quite a nice read.

The poem, however, was quite good and I'm embarrassed to admit that this caught me off guard. I've looked at some of my mom's other efforts in this vein and they've been what I think of as "farm wife" poetry. Not that it's necessarily bad. The feelings expressed are usually heart-felt and sincere. But they're generally rather simplistically put together and a bit clichéd. This piece was very well structured, more of a blank verse format (as opposed to rhyming couplets, which is more common) and handled its images very well.

I know she's been writing these things regularly on her own. I guess should have expected that this constitutes practice so naturally there is improvement. Anyway, I enjoyed it and told her so. And she seemed very pleased with that, which is also nice.