I Don’t Know How Much Longer I Can Do This

When I challenged myself at the beginning of April to write a poem-a-day for National Poetry Month, I must’ve been out of my mind! This has been an exercise in futility to say the least. Besides being nonsensical, my poems have just been bad. As a matter of fact, I believe they’re actually worse now than when I started this project. That said, I guess I’ll still attempt to plow through until the month is over. If nothing else, it definitely gives me a lot more respect for Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Maya Angelou, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to name but a few. (I believe one of my favorite poems is “Paul Revere’s Ride” by HWL. If you’re unfamiliar, you can read it here: http://poetry.eserver.org/paul-revere.html.)

At any rate, since I dedicated an ode to my daughter yesterday, it only stands to reason that my son should get one as well. So, the following is for my kiddo Jeremy…

Jeremy’s Life
By: Rachel Carrera

I wanted to write a verse
To tell you about my son,
About how he’s tall and handsome,
And about all that he’s done.

I wanted to write a poem
Talking about how my boy has grown,
How he’s become a fine young man,
How he one of the best guys I’ve ever known.

But when I started to write my ode
About how he’s brought me so much bliss,
I thought back to when he was little,
And I came up with this:

I had a baby boy;
I named him Jeremy.
I picked him up and carried him,
And he looked up to me.

The two of us would play together
Every morning and afternoon;
And Jeremy would say, “Mommy,
I love you bigger than the moon.”

Jeremy never sat still,
He was as busy as a bee;
He was always climbing
Like a little koala bear in a tree.

As he grew, like any other kid,
He would look at me and groan;
He wanted to be independent
And do things on his own.

He sometimes got into trouble;
We had our share of fights;
Occasionally, I wanted to strangle him
And read him his last rites.

So, when I decided to write a sonnet
About all my boy could do,
I looked back over his twenty years
And thought how the time just flew.

He’s now tall and muscular,
He works out at the gym;
He can pick me up and carry me,
And I look up to him.

You see, when I remember my son’s life
Part of me is torn,
Because even though he’s a man now,
I feel as close as the day he was born.

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