Welcome to the July Poem of the Month!
This month’s poem is one written by my son Alex, who is a rising Senior (gasp) at Lake Washington High School in Kirkland, WA.
When he wrote this poem a few months ago, I asked him to sit down with me at the dining room table and walk me through the poem – to tell me about how he came up with the imagery and why he chose some of the word he did. We had a deep, intellectual conversation about these four stanzas for probably forty-five minutes, and I was struck by the effort he took to choose just the right words to convey his thoughts, by the clear vision he had for this poem, and by the emotive language he painted with.
After our conversation, we both stood up and left the table – me, the proud, smiling dad; he, the young poet.
Alex Todd
(1997 – )
On digging to China
Subtly, the broad clock ticks
Its hands like spears that pierce and puncture
Those bubbles that we blew in the sandbox
The summers reflected our youthful shine
We never thought the lightning and fury and torrent of age would come
After all
Storms were to be laughed at
As our banana-yellow boots danced through the rain
Through the deluge
Through the trifles of life which touched
Neither our hearts, free from trepidation
Nor our supple and soaring minds
All the bitter truths floated with the clouds
Over our heads, but under the sand, and we dug
And dug
Always driving our faded chartreuse plastic shovels deeper than each other’s
Always a winner for deepest hole, hole to China, hole through the earth
But we never reached the bottom of the box, because there was no bottom
It was not just a sandbox but a gaping chasm too
A beckoning abyss
To us, there was no bottom, no final layer on which our shovels would strike
That’s why we kept digging
Now the shovels are cast aside and desolate in their cobwebbed corners
The squared cedar planks once a bold umber, are now a forlorn beige
The wood encasing that nefarious clock
Now we do reach a bottom of the sandbox and stake a woeful claim
The shovels are broken and twisted and warped and forgotten like the biting worries used to be
But I’ll keep digging, all the same
