With Halloween only a few days away I feel like now would be an appropriate time to share this poem. I always feel like people won’t believe me when I say this but I have been writing poems and short stories since before I was in school. Hear me out before you disbelieve me. My grandmother is an accomplished poet and she was also my primary caregiver during the day as both my parents worked. She encouraged me to make up stories and poems and she would write them down. They aren’t all great, obviously, but they did provide a solid path of growth on my writing skills and fostered my creativity from a young age. My aunt in Minnesota ran a poetry magazine so quite a few of these little poems were actually published (nepotism can really get you places sometimes).
People also don’t believe me that I swear I’ve seen weird supernatural stuff from a young age. I definitely believe in the supernatural, and I also believe in science. A lot of the supernatural is probably just stuff we can’t explain yet but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I wrote, well I guess dictated, this poem to my grandmother at the age of five:
Ghost in the Night
Flowers are blue,
Flowers are cool,
Tonight is the night,
The ghost comes by,
Waving in the light.
I have no idea what 5-year-old me thought she saw. I do have this vague memory of seeing a hooded figure pointing at something that I was too afraid to look at. I don’t know if that’s related at all to this poem. I also have no idea why the poem starts off with blue flowers and then changes tempo pretty rapidly. But I do like the poem.
I don’t write as much poetry now as I did when I was younger. I tend to write more poetry when I’m trying to work through my feelings on something; I’m fairly confident that my poor grades in the 10th grade were partially a result of my obsessive cathartic poetry compulsion. Since I started novel writing I find it much harder to write short stories and poems. Although, I’ve found that I have a tendency to write my children’s stories as poems more often than prose.
B. Forrester 