Purging

While going through boxes this weekend for things that I might sell at the flea market, I came across a couple of boxes full of my college literature and history books. I found several papers and projects which I soon found myself reading as if I'd come across some meaningful work of art. (I hadn't, but it was fun to pretend.)

One of my classes required me to keep a reading journal, which I'd never done before, and haven't done since. I leafed through the notebook and read comments from the instructor, whom I happened to enjoy quite a lot. She seemed to like my sense of humor about some of the early American writers we were required to study. I had made a note about having to read more Bradshaw, saying "Oh, No! More Bradshaw this week!" She put a little smile next to it.

The same instructor gave us a project to create a series of poetic pieces in several different styles. I titled mine "Works of Fancy" and put a pretty sunset picture on the cover. Below are the two pieces that most remind me of me. The first one is in a style called "acrostic." In this style, you break a word up into its individual letters, and each line of the poem begins with one of those letters. The poem itself is about the word. The second, I don't remember what style it is, but the trick was that she gave each of us a color sampler from a paint store and we had to write a poem using the name of each of the colors on the sample. I've italicized the words that were underlined in the original. At the bottom of this one, I inserted a picture I'd made on my computer at work a few years before. It's also at the bottom of this post.

Music

Moving and emotional
Undercurrents of rhythm and
Sound
Infinite possibilities with just a few
Chords

Green Tease
Sylvan lands stretch across my vision
Hills of Green hiding mystic secrets
beneath the Green Sheen
and out over the Wide Open Pasture
the Green Tease lures me deeper still.