Day 7 NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo and the prompt is by no means easy. I could go back to this again and again and mine several poems just from my initial list. Identity is a big theme and just think of the associations that get blurted out – fraud, theft, multiple. But what I have mulled over all day is the city mouse/country mouse dichotomy of my own life story. And yes, as I wrote the poem the categories of power and vulnerability oscillated from my original assessment.
Here is the text from the website’s prompt for Day 7:
In our interview, Kyle Dargan suggests writing out a list of all of your different layers of identity. For example, you might be a wife, a grandmother, a Philadelphian, a dental assistant, a rabid Phillies fan, a seamstress, retiree, agnostic, cancer survivor, etc.. These are all ways you could be described or lenses you could be viewed through. Now divide all of those things into lists of what makes you feel powerful and what makes you feel vulnerable. Now write a poem in which one of the identities from the first list contends or talks with an identity from the second list. This might turn out to be kind of a “heavy” exercise, emotionally, but I hope you will find the results enlightening.
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It’s official
certified
stamped on my passports
my status as
native New Yorker
fourth generation arriving
as one in six million stories
in the Naked City
in the Empire State
at the centre of the known world
in 1956
excepting my centre of gravity
(unlike my big brother’s)
is not the subway A train
My pencil pushing Dad
was transferred by his employer to the Poconos
so from 1957
I grew up in the small town
that forged and fabricated
those cars clacketing under bridges
diving through tunnels
I know more about snow
potluck suppers
and party lines
than rock salted streets
Parsons Boulevard
and stimulation 24/7
I know that insomnia
can copulate with silence
cicadas and lightening bugs
as much as in
streets numbered in their hundreds
blazing light
and the shushing of midnight traffic
snaking along the Expressway
I know how to live large
in some place small
learning there how to be
someone who leaves
to have a life beyond
to pretend the power of the streets
but to know more about
navigating the unknown
off the grid plan
yet
I also know
that the Unisphere
is my very own
birthright
which may say something
about what is transmitted
in more than DNA
with that stamp
that certifies
me
and my dichotomies
©2018 Bee Smith
