A Poem That Took a Long Time to Emerge

Honestly, this was messy. I started brainstorming this piece toward the beginning of last school year (September 2016?) when my colleague Chris and I stood peering out the window of our hallway during a passing period. However  I couldn't find the right voice. I throttled three or four muses who refused to speak to me. It came together slowly, and I habitually constructed waaaaaaaaay too many images, and I went through multiple constructs and drafts and finally, with the help of several friends, I was able to filter out a lot of excess symbols and sounds devices to come to what it is now...still not perfect...but it's enough to convey my observations that day.

 “Colliding Fronts”

A Shel Silverstein poem came to life

where the rain ended on the sidewalk,

the visibly invisible demarcation line between sun

and storm dividing the wet from the dry distinctly across the

cracked, black asphalt: waters running left,

dry land remaining right, like the second day of Creation.

Roiling clouds smashed into the invisible wall—

a stark division between gray and blue— and passed through

an unseen sieve and started to dissipate,

sun-streaked cotton unraveling as it spun farther east,

leaving the lot, the ballpark beyond soaking on the left,

the right keeping the bright light from the attic to itself.

The forecaster’s neatly patterned weather lines leaped

from the green screen of Channel Two and established boundaries

in the parking lot—a  backdrop to the shifting, changing weather patterns

manifest in a lone ninth grade girl trudging the hallway,

her swirl of inner storm partitioned off from the blue skies and carefree

clouds she so badly wanted the world to see.