dangling again

Following is my poem ‘dangling’ which can be found on page 12 in my wildly successful (😘)book, “my startled heart.” It tapped me on the shoulder the other day, there’s usually a reason. It will be transcribed here in prose form, a WordPress decision (the form), not mine. I’ll make do with a number of paragrapahs.

“I wrote a poem five years back, when I was older, about teachers, in their public school suits and party dresses, that not one had left his or her mark. On young me. Not one.

But – wait……Total duh. I forgot to remember trees. Trees as my teachers.

In the side yard, at my parent’s two-story house, there was an unusual tree. It remembered to flower every spring. Big, delicate, substantial, pale white flowers. Each one, I was betting, on time just for me. “Here’s a lesson for ya, kid,” they may have said, the laughing flowers. “Just keep on keeping on. Nothing to it.”

There were long string-bean-like add-ons, too, adding to the conversation of the white flowers. And those beans dangled in the light of a little-kid day. Dangle, dangle, dangle. The tree saying, I dangle, therefore I am. The flowers simply for show, cheese in a mouse trap, attention getters to lure and capture 12-year-old eyes.

For some two decades I never knew that tree’s name. I couldn’t tell you, here tonight. But I knew dangling. Like a secret pot of gold, right there in the side yard, right there next to the paint-peeling barn, shading me and my dog. Just dangling.

If someone had stopped me when I was 30-40-50-60 and demanded I tell them what I’d learned, me stiff, full of myself, like a fool, breathing in and out – oxygen and carbon – in other words forever partnering with that tree’s carbon in, oxygen out, maybe I’d of have predicted, exxplained, warned, yawned, offered all my self-centered expertise.

How sad.

It was just three weeks ago I remembered. I remembered how it was to jump out of bed with my morning eyes wide, big, hungry, all the way open. With my tail-wagging dog. With the petals of a pale white flower for a summer hat. Living completely in a string-bean day.

I was dangling then. Just dangling. And somehow, I forgot. I forgot I was just dangling.”