Fourth Grade
I wrote a terrible poem today about the tapping that I do on my phone.
How the tap, tap, tap all day never ends.
And then I read it and feared not good at thinking thoughts.
I look at the trees outside and think about them giving birth this spring.
They are all pregnant with greenery.
I will never birth a child, I know that.
I am more like the wind than a tree, I move around with nowhere to go.
It’s spring and I’m thinking of September and I think of the first day of school
because I know the green beauty of nature will be over before I’m done looking.
I see the sky with its puffs of air and I want to go up there.
I want to live up in the sky for a while.
When I was a kid I would pretend to play the guitar on a blue tennis racket
in the summer on my front porch with my best friend.
I would play tennis with the brick wall with that same racket.
The wall always gave me back my ball, but other people don’t always find it.
I would also imagine scenarios in which pretend people were my friends.
I talked to these invisible gods as they said my name.
My imaginary friends all liked me,
that wasn’t always true of the kids on the playground.
Even recess was stressful for me as a kid,
I would wonder if anyone would want to play with me today.
And when we had field day we had athletic competitions,
I was always last place running.
I couldn’t make myself go any faster and there were kids who would taunt me.
I remember those sunny days in June where the sun felt like a punishment.
And then my fourth-grade teacher told me I was pretty and a good poet.
She was a charismatic black woman in an all-white school.
I knew that me and her were different, she was the only one to see my beauty.
The only one to feel the poetry inside and outside of me.
I was never the girl that made them laugh, I was the one they laughed at.
I was smarter than the white kids, but they never wanted to know what I knew.
I wrote a poem about the ticking of clocks in grade school and now I tap on my phone
and I can’t write about it with any real feeling.
The clock poem went something like this:
‘You know when you sit and listen to your clock?
You hear the sound that goes tick tock.
If I had any money I’d bet you a dime,
It’s the doing of the grand conductor of time.’
The fact that I remember that word for word frightens me.
And I finally met god when I was older and they called me insane.
But I still hear that tick-tock when I tap tap.
They said it's in all in my head.
nina