Nikki Loftin

Archive for April 4th, 2010

The Dreaded Poetry Post

April is, as you are all no doubt aware, National Poetry Month. Many of my Writer Friends and Writer Acquaintances have very bold plans for the month, like writing a poem every day. Seriously. There’s tons of them doing it.

It makes me tired to think about this.

Because I love you (I do, I assure you, love every last one of my handful of readers) and do not wish to alienate you at this early, fragile stage of our e-relationship, I will not follow suit. I will, however, give you a very few nuggets of poetic gold and/or horse manure to ponder. You be the judge.

For today, please enjoy/disdain/mock/scorn/delight in the very first poem I ever had published (in my hometown newspaper, no less!), a copy of which is even now hanging on the wall of my nonagenarian grandmother, confusing anyone who stops long enough to read it. (You’ll see.) I wrote it when I was nine and had fallen hopelessly, haplessly in love with Miss Edith Hamilton and her wicked, wickedly thorough book of mythology. Norse, Greek, Roman gods, all with their similarly gleaming muscles, cruel appetites, and casually incestuous, forked family trees? She exposed them all to my wondering, innocent eyes. Ah, Edith! You ruined me.

Brace yourselves.

Apollo was the god of the sun,

Zeus the Father of All,

Aphrodite, the goddess of love:

Troy, Greece, a broken wall.

A war can kill so many,

but the will of Zeus decides

whch of the ages should live

and which should die.

A giant horse rolled in one day

and it would be his will –

Zeus destroyed near all of Troy,

all Trojan blood was spilled.

Voila, my literary debut, written years before I knew what a Trojan was.

I’ve written a few others since then. Who knows? With enough encouragement and a few dozen margaritas, I might post some of them here this month. If you show me yours, I’ll show you mine.