The Thin Red Line I read them because I had to, The poems, Because I needed the grade They came in all sizes, by which I mean lengths, And shapes, by which I mean arrangements on the page Occasionally a word would hit me like a pistol shot Or the sudden aroma of wet grass And between shots and shoots my mind began to wander about Miss Evans, with her thin red lips and Green bewitching eyes often sighed When I came up short by missing the ‘theme’ Because every poem, she said, was arranged around a theme And when you saw it the words would fit together Neatly as base pairs on a strand of DNA To make her point she used a big red piece of chalk To make a thin red line that cinched a poem together Like a purse And all the crazy words that punched or made me shudder Slipped back into the ranks like chastened soldiers At the sound of their sergeant’s bark From what I could tell the themes couldn’t tell me anything I hadn’t already known: that life was short, love (even puppy love) mostly painful, and that a kind of magic might happen if you stopped and breathed and looked closely enough at something – or someone I spent most of my time in class Looking pretty closely at Miss Evans’ thin red lips and Green bewitching eyes Wondering how in the world she could turn the Eiffel Tower into an edifice, Notre Dame a church and Paris a city of ordinary girls When at last I got up the gumption To show her a poem of my own The theme was so obvious It took an eternity before she cracked a smile ________________________________________________________________________ Emanuel E. García, Leaf Thoughts, One Hundred Poems, 2013 |