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Seeing
I'm not sure anyone really wants to read a poem you've written about them, unless it is a love poem extolling the virtues of your person of interest. If you write a real poem, where you see a person, even if they've exposed that side to you, perhaps especially if they have, they don't necessarily want to read it.
I, who have spent most of my life fervently wishing for invisibility, have also spent it wishing to be truly seen without the seer retreating in fear and loathing. And yet, would I wish to see a poem, written by an intimate, about the me I try to disguise?
I am always tempted to show the poem to its subject. So they know, I see you, all of you, the lovely, the sad, the frightful, the funny and the all the pain and still, I love you.
Once, at writing group, my grandson came with me, and I read a poem I wrote about a day and night with him, where his loveliness and spark flew at me, and I had to write it down before I was left with just a feather of remembrance, and he cried with anger at me; felt I had stolen something from him. I felt awful that he was upset, but knew, secretly, that I would have felt worse had I not written it.
And so a poem languishes on my iPhone and tucked away in my computer that I would love to share, as a message; that family history is not destiny, that self-loathing can be sometimes be softly erased, that not loving yourself does not mean you are unworthy of love.
Maybe the greater act of love is simply in having written it and then hidden it away.
