A friend of mine turned me on to a great poem, which prompted me to revisit the beauty and mystery of poetry.  I committed myself to writing a poem (no matter how terrible or raw) every day of 2018.  My goal?  I just want to remember how much I love poetry, even if I can’t write it, and I hope that I will–by the end of 2018–be able to capture a true image.  Here’s today’s poem.  I didn’t edit it.  I just want to share:

I’m on the other side of the lens.

Remember graduation? Remember all those people sitting around staring and asking awkward questions about future plans?

Remember I had none?

Remember I didn’t care?

Remember when life was so new, so raw, that beginnings like marriage and babies and buying houses seemed so irrelevant?

I look at that old footage from “my time”— first apartments, baggy overalls, Nirvana—I was so young, and restless, and vulnerable.

Weren’t we all? In the 1960s, the 1970s, my eighties and nineties, weren’t we all a bunch of fumbling fools?

You don’t know what you got til its gone.

I didn’t write that, but someone like me did.

Nostalgia. I have it now.

I have that, and I have wisdom, and I have joy, and I have grief…

lots of grief.

What do we trade for our foolishness? Our youthful, fragile bloom? This.