New Here

When I started this podcast a few months ago I did so in conjunction with the launch of my writing consultancy venture WREN CO. The central idea of WREN CO is that I can help others learn to write with confidence, creativity, honesty, and bravery–whether those in cover letters or eulogies or family histories or coming out stories. Ira Glass, I think, puts it best: “Great stories happen to those who can tell them.” So the idea is that I’m here to help folx tell their stories for whatever purpose they have for telling them.

However pretty immediately I realized I couldn’t just offer this service to others. I realized that I have to model my own attempts to write with confidence, creativity, and all that other stuff. 

That’s how come every week for the last four months I’ve shared a piece I’ve written. In each piece I tell stories and in so doing I try to think about the idea telling of stories, as well as honoring the complexity, power, vulnerability, and endlessness of storytelling. 

Most of the pieces are, to my ear, imperfect and unfinished, but the very imperfection is itself something I believe worth modeling. So much in today’s world–IRL and online–is hyper-edited. Perfection, it seems to me, is maybe a little too easy. Give me a good try, the band still figuring itself out, any day over the final album release. Maybe that’s why I’ve not even tried any fancy footwork with the audio editing–I kind of like the rough cut feel to the show. 

But here’s the thing. Lately, I’ve gotten pretty good at writing my piece every week. I’ve figured out how to define different threads, to weave them together, to balance the imagery with the plainspoken, and the emotion with the humorous. I’m putting together a piece in a day or two, sometimes just a couple of hours. Even the recording process has gone faster, and the uploads. I worry it’s all coming across as a little too great. And that’s not what I’m going for here. 

I knew early this week what I wanted to do for today’s show. I noticed every time I thought about it my lower face would snarl a bit. I’m serious, I’m doing it now. You can’t see it but I am. It’s not a great look. But that’s how I knew I had to do it. You see, the idea of writing–and worse still: sharing writing–makes so many of us snarl. And if you had started to get the impression that I was baring my soul like it was NBD you might not know that I know what a BD it is. Such a B-friggin-D. Especially if you don’t wanna. And I don’t wanna. So I’m gonna.

So, this week on WRENCast I’m leaving prose and going to out of my element: poetry. I’ll be sharing with you five poems. Of the hundreds of written over my lifetime, these are the only five I can find. In my head somewhere I’ve got better ones, but you know what they’re probably all just as good, which is to say they all feel just as not good enough.

But I want to do it because we’re all on a journey trying to make friends with our writing. I’ve made friends with prose. So now I need to try hanging out with the poetry crowd. Not because I am a poet or want to be a poet, but because, to paraphrase Ira Glass, “Great poetry happens to those who can face their fears about poetry and write poems, not just in secret but occasionally in public too, even if they’re not as good as Keats or Whitman or even Silverstein.”

One last thing and then I promise I’ll stop stalling. For as timid as I feel about sharing my own poetry, it has been one of my greatest joys as a mother to encourage my daughters in writing poetry. Going back till they were three and four I would show them a picture and together we would write a poem caption. On my Instagram, I’ll share some of these poem captions with you so you can join me in appreciating how effortlessly poetry arises out of children. When I told my daughters that on WRENCast this week I was featuring poetry, they both insisted on grabbing the mic to share some of their own pieces. How could I say no? So please join me in welcoming today’s very special guests, Aurelia Myall, age 9, and Vivienne Myall, age 8. 

Here goes:

“If you give me the chance,” November 2018

If you give me the chance I’ll know your name,

Your kids’ names, your hometown,

Your gripes, your pain, your favorite team. 

I’ll take care of them if you tell me. 

I’ll look at blurry pictures on your phone

And like you my eyes will focus through the blur

On what you love. 

I’ll show you pictures of my kids, 

if you’re the type of person who’d like that. 

Or I’ll just listen.

I’ll listen because you’re showing me it doesn’t happen enough,

Being paid attention to.

I want you to be paid attention to.

It’ll make you feel good.

It’ll make me feel good.

I’ve got five minutes.

We’ll talk about being tired,

About being short on money and long on bills.

We’ll talk about friends who don’t follow through on plans,

Or why you left there to come here.

I’ll learn what you have to teach me,

In the back of your cab, waiting together in line,

At the soccer game, or while you wait out the day

under the keychains display in your mother’s store.

You want me to leave you alone? I will. 

But if you want to talk,

If you want to tell me about your day,

If you need to be seen for a few minutes,

I’d like that.

“Only Son” June 2019, revised January 2020

His hand hovers over hers

His palm eclipsing hers.

She is mother and he is son.

He is growing fast and she is 

Astonished

That her little boy,

Whose coming fourteen years ago

Altered the very orbit of her life,

Can engulf her own strong hand.

She moved him to Scotland from Greece

To give him a better life.

The schools in Greece,

The economy….

None of it offered them much. 

But Scotland has.

The school is good,

His English is good,

Better than hers.

He says he might want to be an astrophysicist someday.

He stands, broadening in the shoulders and in ambition,

And she is proud.

His life will eclipse hers—

Not just for a solar moment,

As quick to pass as if it had never been—

But forever.

And she seems proud to be left behind,

A booster rocket whose very existence is to push him off the surface

Til its own fuel is spent and it releases itself

And free falls back into the ancient pull of gravity,

While he continues to propel himself 

Til he is beyond the pull of a ceaseless orbit.

But I wonder if the rockets she’s given him

Will singe her when they erupt

In their explosive push towards the heavens.

Will he see her as the engineer of his opportunity,

Or the clamps that once held him down?

He’s her only son

And he won’t hold her hand much longer.

“New Here” January 2019 

I am from moving trucks, from never unpacked boxes.

I am from that other town, down the road, yes I’m new here.

I’m from a father itinerant

always striving to better himself,

regardless of the rest of us, determined ever

to pursue greater acclaim

in elite enclaves with wealthy patrons

preaching God’s words through his mouth 

(see that little “h”). 

I am from a mother bitter,

following the Uhaul in the family car

filled to the brim with her homemakings

and displaced dreams. 

I am from not knowing any different,

from fingers smudgy from wrapping 

with newspaper and resigned skill

my precious markers of home—

porcelain figurines and other trinkets befitting

an 8 year old girl—ready to set them up neatly on a shelf 

by my bed in a new room for however long til next time.

I am now settled

10 years into life with the same job and the same town.

My kids’ trinkets are at ease,

scattered all over the floor.

My house is my soul embodied:

a big, warm, sprawling, messy open space,

built on a foundation of granite set deep in the ground.

My home is welcoming to the itinerant—

the visitors from out of town, 

the friend getting divorced, 

the family recently arrived to the US without the contents of a moving truck 

because you can’t drive those here from Africa. 

I am from finding stability inside yourself,

from setting up home,

from finding friends,

and extending warmth. 

I am from the memory

that we were all new here once.

“When you were mine” March 2022

In me.

Of me.

Never mine. 

Your body of cells 

So simple

So complex

Filled my heart

And my belly.

One day you could move. 

You made my taut skin bounce

As you tumbled within.

The first time you adjusted your limbs

I learned

You aren’t mind. You never were.

Beter to know this now,

I thought,

And I slid under the duvet.

“Greatest Love Song” undated

When she was born it was night.

Then in the morning I saw

Her skin was flecked with gold.

Her hair was was made of fine copper strands

And her eyes the blue of an ocean 

Of unfathomable depth.

Have you ever met someone you know so well you’re afraid to ask their name?

Have you ever shared your body with someone who entrusted you with their heart?

Lovers don’t know—they can’t possibly!

They’d be thrown into a jealous rage!—

If they knew the way

The heart

And body

Of this mother

Pounds for this child

Only seconds after meeting.

Who writes the love songs?

Who sings them?

Who croons to supplicate?

Why laud the simple loves of simple love?

I know well that tune,

Recast in different versions

Of the same words

It’s so simple a child could sing it.

But write me the love song

For a mother to sing her girl:

Of raw unbridled attachment,

Fierce defence, and the unwavering promise

Of safe keeping.

Of raging fevers

And throbbing knocks 

Of broken toys

And bespoke packed lunches.

Give me the ballad to sing to her,

Declaring my devotion

And lamenting her inevitable departure.

With a bridge inevitably of missteps and heart ache

Caused by stained shirts and shoplifting and predictable squabbling,

Returning always to the chorus, 

A joyous, decadent, declaration of adoration

The stays humming in the heart long after the song ends. 

“A Poem for Sarah” Fall 2021

“I wanted,” she said as she reached. 

But wanting was interrupted along

Far-reaching horizontal axes. 

Then she looked. 

No barrier crossed her above 

And she saw

Another who reached 

Skyward. 

Walls and wires wind and bind indiscriminately. 

Life is not boundless, we are all rooted

Even as we reach. 

Some can grow up the wall

But can do little without its support. 

Others reach up

Spread over

And extend over a widening patch of existence.

Featherbrains by Aurelia Myall June 23, 2021

Birds are featherbrains

Who won’t let me hold them

But now they fly

Because they can.

I tried to be gentle

But it doesn’t work.

I try to scare them 

So I can get them

Hold them

Put them back.

But they wiggle

Out of my hands. 

Birds are such featherbrains. 

The Wind is a Bossy Mother by Vivienne Myall, Spring 2020

The wind is a bossy mother

She has a thousand children.

She blows them into corners.

Is she bossy? 

Or is she playful?

Oysters & Rust version 1 by Vivienne Myall.

TBD

Oysters & Rust version 2 by Aurelia Myall.

TBD