I just read on Facebook that today is National Poetry Day. How cool is that? Well, my sister Diane loves to write poetry and she even self-published a book called Poetry from a Creative Mind. You can find it at Amazon or at Barnes & Noble or on ebay. Oddly enough, poetry gets put into the “nonfiction” category. I’m not sure why that is because I would think that poetry could either fall into the “fiction” or the “nonfiction” categories, depending on the subject matter. But, then again, what do I know?
It seems that, for writing to be classified as fiction, it has to be prose. Even plays are considered to be “nonfiction.” I’m not sure that I agree with that because I would say that nonfiction would imply a certain level of reality. Thus, I would describe biographies, histories, memoirs, etc., as nonfiction. Poems fall into kind of a gray area because poets often write about their own personal experiences, but the retelling may be more fanciful than factual.
I like fanciful.
But I would not describe it as “nonfiction.”
So… back to the poetry writing… and… um… me.
Since it is National Poetry Day, or so it says on Facebook, I thought that I would share a poem that I write a number of years ago. It is about feelings. They are neither fact nor fiction. They are just there, unable to be categorized, and, like me, not readily agreeable to being labeled and placed in a box.
Here it is, the poem:
Phantom Lover
(blank verse)
The tender look in his eyes
The gently whispered love words,
Suns and moons and stars, and dreams
shared by two, alone at night,
waited far beyond my reach.
Thoughts of love untouchable,
unexperienced, unlived,
flooded dreams shared by just one.
Phantom lover in the night,
unreal, a fragile dream, a
mirage of shattered longings.
If I touched him, would he change,
sharing my sad loneliness?
If he touched me, would I change,
flying with him to magic
stars, untwinkling, lost in hopes…
