Your First Poem Poem by Lizzie Lum

You asked me how I picture it all
those panoramic dreams
carved, chiseled and chipped
crafted with my imagination.

I hear the laughter of the others but I only see you.

Paint splattered forearms
carrying wood again I'm not quite sure where to.
Your whimsical tussled head
with hair the colour of tide-kissed sand in summertime,
always smiling
up to something
forever kind in my eyes.

And I sit with ink-stained fingers looking on
surrounded by scribbles on scraps only I could hope to read
staring out enjoying the clouds again
enthused by white capped cobalt and dancing dunes.
You, like my thumb in the distance. On the beach. Busy.
These windows flung open during June, fastened for fires in January
dogs at my feet atop tartan rugs all year round
their rumbling snoozes the only interlude to this perfect stillness
while I spill more of my life into verse
but struggle to grasp all of what we have between us.
Some words capture the essence of something. But not quite,
for it is much better lived, felt, breathed through us.
But for me these words crystallise some of the magic at least
documenting parts like a written photograph album
my manuscripts of moments, monuments in time
paper crowning them with some permanence
feelings that tumbled their way into letters that fell onto pages somehow.
So that when we're too old, too frail, far too well-lived
to manage the full stretch of that beach hand in hand
totally enraptured with the days of our lives,
we can read these words, perhaps to each other
and relive some of it as if playing our film in our silvery heads
to feel it in our bones as if it were yesterday.

That certain kind of something,
Our different kind of everything.

The dream? All of it. Even this.

© 2014 Lizzie Lumsden All Rights Reserved