Aleathia says:
For several years I have been participating in the April Poem a Day Challenge. A prompt is given and people set out to write a poem somehow relating to the prompt. Many people do not enjoy this format and find it constricting or hard to write from a prompt, but I love it. I find that it gives me an opportunity to explore an angle or an idea that I might now have considered. These days when I hardly write anyway, prompts are a god send to actually make the pen move.
In another sense, they are a catharsis of the winter; an awakening to spring. So for the next month I am going to post a poem. Normally I would post them at the challenge site, but I don't much feel up to swimming in the pond with other people this year. It can be somewhat unnerving and narcissistic to keep going back and hoping your poem is good enough to get selected for the final book. This year I am just going to write.
Feel free to try writing with the prompt yourself. It is fun!
April 1 (prompt is Foolish)
The Wars We Wage
For Sindee
I was foolish to think
I could push you from my heart by hating you,
you the person who carried me
and cared for
me
in the best way you knew how.
You were a child
raising a child
and neither of us could have known
how it would turn out…you chasing flames
and bright lights while I swaddled myself in shadows.
I was foolish to drown myself
in your misery
letting the bottle tell me stories
that were never true but believable
the more I emptied them at the bar.
You were my only mother,
my only direction on
how to be a woman,
my yardstick to
success.
Measuring up to each other
drove us apart
instead of making us run
to the finish a little faster.
I was foolish to wait so long to hurt,
to grieve,
to say goodbye.
So today,
I say I love you.
Today I say goodbye
sitting in my car
watching April showers
clean away the winter
and the salt.
Today,
I start again.
Aleathia Drehmer 2016
Happy Birthday Mom, I miss you.
