Risk Exercise And (Not Or) How I Spent My Sunday Afternoon

Yesterday's assignment at NaPoWriMo was to write a poem about friendship, preferably one with concrete images and no sentimentality.

Electro-Girl

Come sit with me, my friend.
We'll have a cup of tea,
green for you

and red for me,
and you can tell me all
about the days of your life.

I thought of you this morning
when I drove up Albert Street
and saw graffiti scrawled

on the yellow concrete wall
above the woods
where homeless people sleep.

Peace be with you, I read,
then farther down the hill,
Electro-Girl.

I couldn't tell.
Was Electro-Girl the author
of this fine sentiment,

or was she
the one addressed,
the one blessed?

Do you remember
when we found a poem
scribbled on a napkin,

stuffed inside a book
we had both read?
We laughed and laughed;

we couldn't remember
which of us had written it,
but we knew it was ours.

*************************************************************

So. After my morning poetry exercise, I went downtown to the library for a reading by Kim Goldberg, a local poet who works with both words and images (photographs and drawings), often using found objects and recycled materials as an integral part of her poems. I bought a signed copy of her book Ride Backwards on Dragon, and I brought home a few freebies that she calls piglets - poems packaged individually, meant to be "seeded" - left at bus shelters or on park benches for people to find. Such a cool thing to do - the seeding of poems, I mean, not the scoring of piglets - though that felt pretty cool, too.