Chalk and Cheese

Day 2: "In her poem, “Pittsylvania County,” Ellen Bryant Voigt recounts watching her father and brother play catch with sensory detail and a strangely foreboding sense of inevitability. The speaker watches the scene filled with a pervading sense that she wants something more or different from life than what the moment seems to presage. 

Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be."

I'm drawn to write about my children rather than myself.  It was so clear from a very early age they would grow up to be very different from each other.  

Chalk and Cheese

As a baby she'd want company,

To be beside, to be talked to, to be held.

As she grew her circle grew with her,

The daughters of her mother's  friends,

Schoolfriends, neighbours,

Those she charmed on bus rides.

Later there were the front garden gatherings,

Where, to the insistent beat of a boom box,

She instructed a gaggle of neighbourhood kids

In the correct choreography to all her favourite songs.

He was easy, self contained,

Content to lie in his pram looking out at the world.

As he grew, he was encouraged to join in, 

Suffered the brothers of his sister's friends,

The unkindness of schooboys, 

The grass cuttings thrust in his mouth, a pierced eardrum.

He resisted family hugs, refused goodbye kisses,

Withdrew the weight of his arms from round his mother's neck,

Found peace in the quiet of his own company, 

The security of one trusted friend.

Like chalk and cheese, like the sun and the moon,

They grew true to their natures,

Gifting their differences to me, and the world.

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