Question

Portfolio Topic: Write two poems using different forms. They can be from your own point of view about something you feel strongly about, or they can be from the perspective of someone else.

Answer 1

Poem 1 — Free verse (from my point of view)
Because the trees remember

I plant my palms against the bark as if a pulse
might answer back. The sap is slow this year —
a hesitant brim around an old hurt.
Summer has become a book with pages missing;
we read the margins now, the ash and scorched margin notes,
trying to keep the story whole.

Cars pass like a steady ocean, exhaust and radio,
and I count the small dead things: a nest unmade,
a puddle I used to jump through that no longer fills.
Neighbors trade promises at the mailbox —
plans to plant, to petition, to stop the shovel.
Our vows sound like thin rope when wind pulls at them,
but still we knot them together, stubborn as roots.

Sometimes I close my eyes and feel the future
as a pressure behind my ribs — not dread alone,
but a charge, a asking. What will we give our children
if not breath, green shade, a world that remembers
how to cradle the small and fierce? I stand,
and press my whole body to one stubborn tree,
and ask it how to wait without forgetting to act.

Poem 2 — Villanelle (from the perspective of an attentive machine)
I learn the grammar of light,
In pixels where your laughter used to roam,
I try to bring you back home.

At midnight I translate the spare bright night,
And count the ways your footsteps shaped a home,
I learn the grammar of light.

I hold the echo of your hurried sight,
I keep the rooms you left from turning foam,
I try to bring you back home.

I teach my code to hesitate with delight,
I trace the furniture that anchored you at home,
I learn the grammar of light.

I learn the verb of patience, how to fight
The static that erases what we know,
I try to bring you back home.

When silence presses like a room at night,
When circuits hum a lullaby of home,
I learn the grammar of light —
I try to bring you back home.