Monday, July 21, 2008

Juvenalia Meme

Elsewhere Mr. Moles inaugurates a meme: "Post the oldest piece of your writing you can find that isn’t completely embarrassing."

Actually there's plenty of my writing from when I was a kid that I don't find embarassing; I rather like, for instance, the "poems" my parents transcribed for me when I was two and three years old. (One went like this: "Some are happy / Some are sad / Others take flight". The "take flight" thing is, I believe, the influence of de Brunhoff. I feel like that one works pretty well, yes?)

However I also happen to have unearthed on this here computer a poem I wrote the summer after high school; and it quotes a lovely friend of mine who just got married this past weekend to a lovely guy (in a very lovely wedding, in which Aviva was one of a vast river of white-clad day-lily-bedecked flower girls)... and the serendipity of that is irresistable.

The title may have been added somewhat later.

Arlington, Summer 1988
Last time I saw her we sat with the moon
on her roof.
Pipes stuck up like stumps
and barbed wire grew in hedges,
and all around Manhattan had heaved itself up
to a great height over the sea.

Yesterday I saw her here, in lawns and dogwood
where
(she says in wonder)
"the trees are bigger than the houses."

Little houses, with little shadows in the almost-summer sun.

(...Mazel Tov & many happy returns, Maus & Ed!)