Shopping Cart
    items

      April 11, 2015Water FallKailani Bird Clarke

      Do you ever sit in a bathtub
      naked,
      the shower on,
      the drain closed,
      water coming up to your thighs, and you lean back
      and put the bottoms of your feet directly in the stream
      of water,
      and the droplets hit your soles,
      and you wonder if this is what love is like,
      an unknown feeling felt
      nowhere else except a place
      as dirty and cracked and unseen as the bottoms of your feet,
      or maybe your heart,
      and perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the words
      “soul” and “sole”
      sound the same,
      and you enjoy the feeling for a little while,
      and then you realize you’ve wasted so much water
      and time,
      so you turn it off
      and open the drain
      and lie there staring
      at ceiling tiles wetted by steam
      as your body dries
      and the water leaves you like friends that had to go away,
      and you see that it was worth it all,
      and maybe the water wasn’t wasted,
      and then you stand and grab a towel and
      move on.

      from 2015 RYPA

      Kailani Bird Clarke (age 14)

      Why do you like to write poetry?

      “For me, writing poetry is not a choice. More an instinct. It’s what comes when a previously ineffable emotion becomes tangible, when a word or phrase gets lodged like a seed in my brain and grows, and when a feeling that demands to be put into words speaks out.”