Tenure

I offer you gifts
of words newly strung
and tender,
strong and
sometimes proud,

words that are still humming
with the cadence
of my beating heart
from which poems burst forth
onto the page.

I call them my poems,
but we both know
this is folly.

The purled words don’t belong to me
any more than the morning sky
I kiss with my eyes,
or the breath I take in
that my lungs wring out
and return as something transformed.

Here on earth we
borrow things
like time
and plots of land
and beings that come through us.

we
label things ––
yours, theirs, mine

we
covet things
bits of shiny coin and
metal beasts that transport us,
wood boxes that give shelter.

We
think we own so much
of what passes though our lives

yet the Earth always reclaims
her soil
and rubbish
and creatures

as she’ll reclaim our teeth,
our fine furniture,
our soft organs and
all those volumes
of poems
I said I wrote
for you.

 

–Melinda Coppola