What makes a person? It's an interesting question.
Do past traumas? Old relationships? Physical challenges? Movies? Television shows? Parents? Teachers? I guess it boils down to nature versus nurture. Are we born with our personalities, or do our personalities develop over time?
Sharon Olds meditates on why she was born . . .
Why My Mother Made Me
by: Sharon Olds
my father as a woman,
maybe I am what she wanted to be
when she first saw him, tall and smart,
standing there in the college yard with the
hard male light of 1937
shining on his slicked hair. She wanted that
power. She wanted that size. She pulled and
pulled through him as if he were silky
bourbon taffy, she pulled and pulled and
pulled through his body till she drew me out,
sticky and gleaming, her life after her life.
Maybe I am the way I am
because she wanted exactly that,
wanted there to be a woman
a lot like her, but who would not hold back, so she
pressed herself, hard, against him,
pressed and pressed the clear soft
ball of herself like a stick of beaten cream
against his stained sour steel grater
until I came out the other side of his body,
a tall woman, stained, sour, sharp,
but with milk at the center of my nature.
I lie here now as I once lay
in the crook of her arm, her creature,
and I feel her looking down into me the way
the maker of a sword gazes at his face
in the steel of the blade.
We all hold onto things--trinkets from the past that seem too important simply to throw away. I still have a People Magazine from the week River Phoenix died. I've been keeping diaries and journals since I was in middle school. I have boxes and boxes of them. I've been posting on this blog for close to 15 years now. Well over 5,000 posts.
My poems and posts and stories and journals are my my mementos. They remind me of who I am, where I come from. And now this post will be another of those reminders. Twenty years from now, I may reread these words and not remember a single thing about their composition. Or I may remember everything.
What I want to remember about today: my wife and I watched an episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel tonight. Being happy. Feeling blessed. Not wanting the night to end.
Saint Marty wrote a poem for today about all those things that remind us of life . . . and death, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:
Find an index card and turn it vertically. Write a poem about something that doesn't last long. Writing on an index card vertically will result in much shorter lines--see how this added structure changes how you normally write. For extra credit, turn the index card over and write horizontally about something that lasts a long time.
Memento Mori
by: Martin Achatz
My sister's hospital badge,
from when she was still saving
people's lives. A polaroid
of a cocker spaniel, blue ball
in his jaws, as if he's waiting
for me to toss it one last time.
My grandfather's wedding ring,
worn smooth as an old tooth.
My grandma didn't want it,
told me it belonged to his first
wife, as if love was a well
that could run dry. We all keep
tokens like these in dresser
drawers, closet boxes. I bet
Mary Todd kept the silver
half-dollars from Lincoln's
eyelids. Maybe she worried
them all day until her fingers
burned, slept with them
under her cool pillow at night
until she couldn't remember
the sound of his voice or
the smell of his
whiskered cheeks.
❤️jt
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