they had it wrong,
the old comics.
you are only clark kent
after all. oh,
mild mannered mister,
why did i think you could fix it?
See how with that question she so easily invites you to talk with her about this? After all, she's writing to Clark Kent, and letting us eavesdrop. It feels like she would be open to conversation with us ordinary folk, too. And she is--all four poems are spare but rich with feeling, and the casual tone makes it easy to engage with her words---to talk with this great poet about superheroes, admiration and disillusionment, rescue and risk...and so much more. Please read more here (all four poems are very short.)
At first, I simply imitated one of her poems, beginning with her line "They had it wrong..."
They had it wrong,
the bishops—
you can’t slide
across the board
slicing through armies
on the sly to meet the queen;
how you must have puzzled
at my idea that I was
invisible, able to slip
between worlds,
to Narnia or Prydain.
What did I expect?
That the shadow
of my pointed hat—
the open book a peak
over my eyes—
would make me
less of a pawn,
plodding my way
from chamber
to chamber,
from dark to light
and back again?
-----Sara Lewis Holmes (all rights reserved)
On my second try, I veered off, and decided to address the poet directly, triying only to match her easy flow of ideas and emotions, as if I were writing her a note, too:
Dear Lucille,
I didn’t crush on Superman,
my comics were Casper,
that pudgy, good-hearted ghost
and Scrooge McDuck,
whose pert-tailed nephews’
names rhymed like rap,
so I guess that’s why my questions
are different. I didn’t wonder who
they were—human or superhero—
I only wanted to float through
fights, misunderstandings, and darkness—
or to waddle, flanked by friends,
into schemes and out again, unchanged—-
to be the reason the story took you
out of this world into that one,
but didn’t leave you heartless.
-----Sara Lewis Holmes (all rights reserved)
You can find the conversations my poetry sisters had with these poems here:
Poetry Friday is hosted today by Marcie Flinchum Atkins
