Dark
My kid writes a poem. And I write a poem based on her poem. Because why the fuck not?
What my daughter Lucy wrote, 2014 (age 9);
Dark
By Lucy Foster
Wrapped in a quilt is where
I most like to be
It's as warm as a lit light
bulb. When I'm there, I curl up in a little
ball, like a sleeping
cat. Wrapped in a quilt is
night time.
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Inspired, what I wrote after reading her poem in 2014::
Dark
By Kim Foster
My daughter is a tight, quiet
ball. Wound up in quilts, her feet hanging
out, bare and cold, like two small
birds, stranded from the
nest.
It is winter outside the quilt, in the
yard, in this room, in my
head. I feel it creeping in through the
cracks in the window. I feel it
seeping through the threads of my
sweater. But inside her
quilt, it is jungle
summer.
Her hair is a tangle of vines twining itself around the
trunk of her body, and her
breathing is the rasp and howl of
monkeys slamming through
branches, and her legs are coiled and twisted around
themselves like a snake holed up in the
hollow of her
belly, and her eyelids are veiny leaves
trembling under hot drops of
rain.
I want to pull away, go back to my
words, and my keyboard, but I can't stop looking
at her. I am stuck
there, wondering if I parted the
quilts, wiggled in next to
her, buried my face in her
neck, covered her like I was the tough
bark of her tree, if I might catch the
sun scooping the last of its light into her lowest
hanging branches.
But I hesitate too
long, and catch the snow on the window
sill. I pull my sweater up around my
neck and head out across a tundra of
wooden floors to my
table. And my fists peck the
keys, two pale Finches trying to get through
winter.
_____________________________________
Sometimes, when I stumble across these little writing memories, from my 2022 viewpoint, where my daughter is almost an adult, it feels like Lucy and I wrote this together.
We didn’t.
But then again, we kinda did. In my mind, anyway.
I’m going with that.
