Patience required

Random quote of the day:


"Success comes to a writer, as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed."

—P. G. Wodehouse, Louder and Funnier






( Illustrated version. )

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Whirligig

From the notebooks, March 18, 2000



Whirligig

  for the girl

“I am so lost right now,” said the girl at the bookstore,
“like when I was a kid on a spinner at the playground
and I fell off and I wanted to get back on, but I couldn’t.
And it kept spinning.”

I wanted to say to her, “You are not alone.
There is another world outside this world,
standing right beside it, hard to get to,
but worth the struggle.
And it has nothing to do with them.
And it doesn’t mean there is anything
wrong with you.”

But I turned coward instead and said,
“Get used to it. It’s the world.”

It was as cynical as I meant it to be,
but it was far more cynical than I meant it to be.

Out on the curb before stepping down, I thought,
“I do not want to go back to my life.
It is not what I came here for.”

I wrote this poem on the drive home
and every block I told myself to stop,
turn around, go back. Tell her,
“You are not alone.”