pregnancy due date

Monday, June 1, 2009

There Are No Words...

Over the years, I have been known to dabble in a bit of mediocre poetry - it's something I routinely obsess over and then abandon for months at a time, but I always come back to it. Longfellow I am not, but when life starts to overwhelm (or underwhelm) me, it provides an outlet. I have written about so many different aspects of my life, from the trivial to the touching to the traumatic, that I was surprised to realize one day that I had not yet felt moved to write about my pregnancy. I sat down and attempted to put on paper the many feelings, emotions, thoughts and questions that I knew were floating around in my head - and found it nearly impossible. After the third or fourth time I had written, reviewed and erased several verses of prose, it occurred to me that my inability to express myself in this situation was the best testament to how truly profound and remarkable this experience really is - so instead of writing about it, I wrote about my inability to write about it. The poem below is the result.

Life is a funny thing.

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There Are No Words...


Pen to paper proves useless
The words don't come
Strange that I can’t explain this gift
Looking back through the pages
So many moments cast in ink
Dark days mingling with moments of greatness
Sweet sanity woven into the madness
Facts and figures
Puzzles and riddles
Questions and answers
Nonsense, common sense, perfect sense
Expressions of hope, fear, sorrow
Stories of loss, betrayal, redemption
The evil and the righteous
Declarations of love
Admissions of regret
Childhood, adulthood, awkward stages in between
Confusion mixed with clarity
Truth, beauty
Good, bad, ugly
The best and worst of me
I have written them all with ease
Thoughts forming letters forming phrases
Flowing from my hand
As if they’d been there all along
Waiting to be set down
And yet now, in this moment
The flutter in my heart leaves me speechless
Standard emotions easily identified
But the real significance
The true greatness
As I said, there are no words
An event that brings faith to the faithless
That makes men of boys
And humbles our very existence
If I could take the joyful tears from my eyes
The constant smile from my lips
The eager twinkle in my eyes
The nervous wringing of my hands
The impatient pacing of my feet
The excited racing of my heart
And put them all on this page
That would be the poem I’d need to write
To make it accurate
To make it complete
To make it worthy
In the absence of such a translation
I offer the closest summary I can summon: I cannot wait to meet you

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