A Deeper Pretending
Poems
- Complete Poetry Publication List
- The oldest lobster fisher in the world says she might as well keep doing it
- A Reckoning With Johnny Appleseed
- The sparrows (Once again, I was wrong)
- For the grandmother teaching the children how to plant seeds in the community garden
- Substitutions for Buttermilk
- Make Believe
- For the students
- An Answer
- The scientist and the poet
- A 10-year old boy finds a stick on a field trip to the beach
- Clutch
- Erosion
- Piano lessons
- On the Impermanence of Tools
- The Photographer
- A Deeper Pretending
- After days of deep grief
- The News
- How I Wanted to be Beautiful
- Gathering stones
- Writing on Mother’s Day
- Learning to Fish
- Every day something new
- Insights from Arthropods
- Defensible Space
- Turtles at the Convention Center
- Spring Hatch
- On the evolution of shadows
A Deeper Pretending
Try to write a bad poem before breakfast.
— William Stafford, as quoted by Naomi Shihab Nye
OK, I’ll try,
but I have never been much good at being bad.
No, it’s not like that!
It’s not that I am good at everything,
or think I am.
It is a deeper pretending,
a tacit avoidance of things not yet known or learned,
a nodding along sometimes when people talk about that book
I should have read by now.
It started early.
“You’re so quiet,” they told me.
“So good at knowing things. So smart.
That’s good!”
They told me so often it’s all I thought I was.
Held up a trick mirror to show
only one edge of my humanity.
They told me so often it’s all I thought I was.
Held up a trick mirror to show
only one edge of my humanity.
Why do we tell children they are anything?
I am still unraveling it,
the tight ball formed around
that one kernel of identity,
like today,
unsure of every word here,
catching myself thinking
I should get better at being bad
before doing it in front of anybody.
—
Originally published in What We Were Born For.
