aqua fortis

Monday, November 29, 2010

A Poetic Interlude

To be perfectly honest, I haven't blogged lately because I've been experiencing extreme blog performance anxiety and existential blog-related angst. What if I don't have anything interesting to say? What if nobody cares about [insert random topic here]? Is it even worth blogging when there are so many other blogs out there with far more profound, useful or entertaining content than mine? You know, the usual.

So, while I recover from this funk (and, let me tell you, this particular type of funk is a lot less fun than it sounds) I offer you a couple of poems I wrote when I was a kid. These were written in one of many partially-filled journals I used to jot things down in. People seemed to really like giving me journals and diaries  when I was young, and I had a tendency to use maybe the first ten or twenty pages and then put them aside. I was not a good diary-keeper, though I tried. Entries were usually along the lines of "Dear Diary, today I went to the dentist. I got McDonalds afterward. On Saturday I had to visit my dad. We went to a movie but it was boring." Not even very descriptive.

Mostly I preferred the less diary-oriented blank books, in which I doodled, wrote random poems and stories, and practiced weird styles of handwriting. (When I was older, this changed to song lyrics and increasingly angsty poems.) Anyway, I was rummaging in a box in the garage earlier tonight and found a couple of these journals. One poem, appropriately enough, was about Thanksgiving. I wrote this when I was about nine:

Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is a happy time,
A time to stuff your face;
Thanksgiving is a thankful time
To say a prayer of grace.

That's my punctuation--no after-the-fact editing. Apparently my unholy love of the semicolon had already started. And I really liked rhyming poetry.

I also wrote this strangely prophetic untitled poem about being an author. I had no intention, as you know, of actually being a writer until about ten years ago. However, at age 10 or so when I wrote this poem, I did already love the act of writing. Evidently the career didn't appeal quite so much.

If I were an author, I'd wonder who
I would dedicate all of the books I wrote to. 
Maybe my mother or father or uncle or aunt or cousin or....WHEW!
Or who I would write all my books for...
I don't think I want to be an author any more.


I find this highly amusing.

3 comments:

tanita✿davis said...

Hahahaha! Early existential angst, as well -- the idea of novel dedication was enough to put you off the whole authoring thing.

By the way... to whom DID you dedicate your novel? Hmmmmm????

(Aside: why do we have to do that, anyway? I mean, I write books for imaginary audiences. I swear, the next time I'm going to say, "For all the imaginary people to whom I told this story." Geez.

David T. Macknet said...

There are those of us who continue to read your blog and continue to like you no matter what topic you choose. It's not about that.

Sarah Stevenson said...

Thanks, David...I appreciate that. :)

T: That is an interesting question. I actually can't remember off the top of my head. I'll have to check. I know I dedicated my Olwen novel to my grandfather.