National Poetry Month is winding down, and while I haven’t posted each day here on the blog, I’ve written a poem every day in April for VerseLove on Ethical ELA.

April 22nd was Earth Day. Host Emily Cohn invited poets to “remember an island: real, fictional, ancestral, or otherwise… Imagine or describe a world there.”

I have a favorite childhood memory about an island. I wrote a post about it seven years ago (Breakfast Island); this week I returned to it and condensed it into a poem.

Two takeaways: 1) Rewriting IS writing and 2) Less is more. I find the original post far too wordy now.

Here’s the revision.

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Island Gift

On a chilly gray dawn
my family piles into 
my uncle’s motorboat

we are all together
speeding over the Severn 

the grown-ups have decided
it would be fun to have 
breakfast on the beach

my uncle knows just the place
a little island where people
sometimes stop off

I shiver in the lifejacket
until my teeth chatter

I am starving 
how long
is this going to take?

turns out the island
is only a mound of sand
with a bit of scraggly brush
In the middle

I walk the entire edge of it
while the grown-ups
are building the fire

the sun is up, golden,
warming my cold skin

the gray Severn
is now sparking blue

What is this island’s name?
I ask my uncle
as sausage links begin sizzling
in a pan

It doesn’t have one
 
I have never heard of a place
not having a name

Why don’t the owners name it?
 
No one really owns this island…
it’s just a small place,
here in the river
 
I don’t know why
this makes me want
to cry

my uncle, turning the sausages,
squints up at me:
what is the matter?
 
It should belong to somebody
 
You’re right. I think
it should be you. 
Congratulations!
You now own an island
 
my heart beats fast
because I know, right now,
that I want this island
to be mine forever
but

Do I have to pay for it?
 
my uncle laughs loud and long

(I will remember this
when the family
isn’t a family
anymore)

Since there’s no other owner
it’s free

someone is frying apples
the aroma rises
like incense from an altar
in thin blue smoke
vanishing in the breeze

I tell the island I love it

it whispers 
that it loves me back

and I know
for this one morning
that I am the richest person
on Earth

I own an island

and it’s free

Photo: Paul VanDerWerf. CC BY

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thanks to Emily Cohn for the island invitation on VerseLove at Ethical ELA

an to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life sharing-place