Travel As Muse

Besides my official title as mom and teacher, I am a poet at heart. I was a poet first, after all. I wrote my first poem at age 7, and it was about the poor crocodilles, baby crocodiles who cried crocodile tears in their tiny homes under the grass canopy of my front yard. 🐊💧

I don’t publish or perform my poetry, instead my poetry is like a delicious secret that links moment after moment of my private experiences.

Sometimes I do share my poems, as I am about to do in this side post. I studied poetry as a graduate student at Oklahoma City University. I workshopped and presented and edited and even performed once at a local coffee shop, but ultimately I decided that writing poetry was more of a private and sentimental act for me.

If you know me, then you know you don’t actually know me until you have known me for some time, and I’ve been able to let down my guard enough to be my true and silly sentimental self.

However, I have recently decided that I want to share my poetry in a more public way which means that I want to read it in front of an audience.

It doesn’t really matter who that audience is. But, I don’t want to just read it, I want to inflect it intentionally the way I do when I read it out loud to myself. Inflecting intentionally takes some bravada, some stage presence which I can definitely muster when I am talking to my students or children or a close friend. It’s not something that comes naturally when I’m talking to a group of strangers.

In order to overcome this stage reluctance, I have decided that I first need to do karaoke. I have never done karaoke. I’m uncomfortable with the idea of doing karaoke. I have no idea what song I would sing in karaoke. So for the past few YEARS, I have been thinking about what song I should sing in my big karaoke debut.

While driving down a pretty desolate and depressing highway 70 toward the more interesting I-10 in the Texas panhandle towards Arizona, I listened to an array of potential songs, and I think I’ve finally landed on The One. Let me practice it for the next few months, and maybe I can get up enough nerve to do it!

One of the reasons I’m so adamant about my karaoke experience is because I think it will help me level up my performance presence, so that I can intentionally inflect some of the obviously nuanced inflections that are sooo important to understanding the essence of my poetic work. 🙄

Wish me luck!

Speaking of that desolate drive on highway 70 South of I-40 and on the way to I-10, I was awed by the number of dust devils there were. One even crossed the highway were we drove. It lifted us like gentle turbulence. I naturally kept my foot off the brake and my hands firmly on the wheel. It left just as suddenly as it arrived. I’m used to large gusts of wind jolting my vehicle an inch or so to the side, but this was a little different. It was a lift instead of a push.

Later, I began to see signs that instructed drivers on best practices during a dust storm. Foot off the brake, steer toward the shoulder, engines off, keep seat belts on. In other words, let go of control because control is no longer yours, instead go with the aerodynamic flow.

As often happens while I lie awake at night, my mind gets creative and I come up with snippets of poetry/titles/concepts that I write down, and while writing them down I may go ahead and complete a verse or two to be looked at later, admired, edited and then forgotten. I always rediscover my poetry later, about every spring. I add it to an ongoing collection and then promise myself I will share it one way or another and perhaps even, dare I say it, publish something!

My poetry is usually instigated by an outward experience, usually natural, that makes me think of a similar inner experience that is often hidden. In other words, the concrete world gets translated as abstract idea. Because I love language, I play around with literary devices and I usually land on something that is both clever, at least to me, and poetic. It’s also very sentimental, and every scholarly/ literary ideologist knows that, past high school, sentiment is not wanted in poetry. Too bad for me. Good thing I don’t want to be a famous or successful poet.

True story: I once asked Neil Gaiman in a tweet on Twitter if it was ok to be a closet writer and he said yes, it was ok to be a closet writer. So, I’d like to invite you to my closet and share the following poem that was inspired by a dust devil, a natural phenomenon, that just earlier reminded me of the abstract idea of falling in love.

Dust Devil

Love is like a dust devil

that lifts you off the highway

as you barrel through your life.

Naturally unnatural,

it lifts you from the ground and

you must keep your feet off the brake,

steer your car in the direction of the wind,

and keep your seat belt on.

Whatever trajectory you were on

is now changed

just enough that you are

no longer who you were

before it struck.

(C) Aharen Richardson

Apparently, I’m not the first to connect dust storms or dust devils in this region with poetry! https://shallowsky.com/blog/travel/burma-shave-dust-storm.html