One of my personal artistic commitments this year has been to work on my poetry. I’ve always liked reading and writing poetry, but I’ve never gone much further than first (bad) draft, and never attempted to publish anything.

So this year I am both picking through and editing the surplus of first drafts I have, as well as looking out for places to send them for consideration.

Embedded in the commitment was to TRY and be more public with my poems. I still cannot bring myself to share them so publicly on here (baby steps!) but I thought I’d share one of my dad’s favorite poems instead.

Amongst the many forms of art my dad enjoyed, reading poetry was maybe one of his least known. As far as I know he never wrote any, and of his many learning pursuits I don’t think it got much attention. But the poems that impacted him as a young man he could spout off with a great memory and cadence for them decades later.

Robert Frost’s “Two Roads Diverged in a Wood” has the famous last lines –

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

But he also really liked the opening –

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could”

It captures his love of so many diverse things well. He pursued so, so much that interested him, yet I think he always felt “sorry I could not travel both” for all the things he didn’t choose. There would never be enough time for everything he wanted to know and learn and get good at.

I have plenty of poems to explore about the last year and a half – finding out we would be losing Dad soon, not knowing when he would go for nine months, losing Dad, then so quickly losing Grandma. More than any writing after Dad passed, I dove into poetry. I read an Ursula K. LeGuin book recently where she said, “Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside.“ I know what happened this last year, but now I need to know what happened. And for me, that is done in poetry.

So April being National Poetry Month I had an even more specific job I set myself. The first half of the month I worked on two poems about my dad, revising and revising and revising. The second half of the month I chose which poems I would work on for the rest of the year and wrote them all in second (bad) draft form so I have them all in one book to work from.

The nice part about doing it that way is I think I’ve identified three distinct collections to work them into. Shall you ever seem them? Beats me. But it’s been nice to work on a project that’s all about the art. And I’d like to think my dad’s hand is in it.