I began the fall semester of 2016 excited for, among other things, a creative writing course I was enrolled in. For years, I have been someone who thinks about writing. For countless hours, I have thought about honing my craft. I’d tell everyone that I would be a writer someday. That I was just about to work on something great. That’s where I stayed my whole life, right on the edge of something. I could never bring myself to actually write anything. Taking a creative writing course was something of a leap.

Two weeks into the semester my grandfather passed.

I was hit hard. My grandmother passed away the previous March after struggling for years with Alzheimer’s. He took care of her. And in her absence, he declined so fast that everyone who knew him was astonished. He went from lucid to unable to recall my name in a week, and in two I was a stranger to him. I was struck by an image, one night lying awake trying to remember the last time I had enjoyed a moment with family without enduring the specter of lost memories and long goodbyes.

I thought of my childhood with my grandparents as a beautiful garden, the ornate kind that only exists in books and pictures, with statues and fountains covered in ivy. I thought of a statue in that garden, and how if it were cracked, in danger of crumbling, no one would be able to tell until the ivy was cleared away. I felt very deeply that the deepest problems hide below the surface, waiting to be revealed.

What followed was the first poem I have written in my life that felt honest. So much of the work produced in a writing course (fearing the whip-crack of a deadline) feels arbitrary and contrived. This was possibly the first time in my life I wrote something real.

And it helped, if only a little.

~~~

Bad Poem of the Week:

Love Unseen

Only when the Garden had withered

Did we see the cracks in the Statue;

A façade of strength upheld in beauty, upheld no more.

You cannot fix what is hollow,

He hates you for trying.

He wants to wither, and so he crumbles.

They’ll be together again in dust.

-for my grandparents