Day 2 NaPoWriMo - To RM in 2040

Thank you to Christopher Luna for his Tuesday Zoom poetry session. His prompts and collages inspire me to write and push through language and get to the heart of a poem. The poem I wrote for day two was inspired by the prompt Chris included from Poets & Writer's "The Time is Now" which you can find the same prompt here.

To RM in 2040

I hope to hold you as I do now,

to breathe deep the waves of

your essence, to build poems

around you as protection, but

with enough grit to raw your skin

like sand clinging to your sticky

ocean body. I hope for the ocean,

the Pacific to be exact, that grand

mouth swallowing the sky. I hope

to follow you through your first steps

of becoming a woman, to give you

hope in the space of your body,

that being a woman is not a cage,

but is an opportunity, a privilege.

I hope to build you a world where

it is easy to say safe and free in

the same sentence. I hope you will

discover within you the path to walk

into the sky. I hope you will gather

your language with care, as you

would food from the forest, some

words are edible, others poisonous.

I hope you learn the curves of your body

are a beginning that continues

into a beginning. I hope you learn

I’m not always right and being right

and wrong is a spectrum, a prism

of choices. I hope you understand

permission helps, but you don’t need

permission from anyone but yourself.