I have started my much anticipated poetry class with the amazingly talented and all-around awesome Maya Stein.
I’ve always been the math chick. I’m an accountant; numbers are kind of my thing. In high school, I remember crying in English class when I was given an assignment to write. Words are not my thing. They fail me and they escape me. I would get so frustrated at my inability to write, that the tears would come to eyes, and I’d try to blink them back. It was always so hard for me to create. Now, numbers on the other hand, they were black and white and needed no creativity. Numbers have been a comfortable friend.
So, this is the poem that I worked on last week with Maya.
And…here goes nothin’.
WAITING ROOM
That middle of the night
phone call – it came.
Speeding to the
hospital, I made wicked deals with a
God I didn’t believe in.
The door to the ER eluded me,
playing hide-and-seek
like a game around a fat tree trunk.
My father kept me
away. I know it. He hid so I would
be unable to call him
back.
His most selfish act.
I found it – in time for nothing except
to sit in a waiting
room for the words to destroy me:
he’s died.
