What I Really Want to Do

A Sunday Poem

Today seemed like a good day for a poem-ish thing. 💙

Happy Sunday, my friends.

I hope you’re finding your feet. I think I finally am.

-Kendall

What I Really Want to Do

We forget that our ancestors were fish

who, against all odds, sprouted limbs

and gasped out of ancient seas

to give gravity a chance.

…

Now we stand by fruit platters

with legs planted wide,

holding fistfuls of grapes

and turn to each other and ask,

What do you do?

with raised brows and hollow eyes,

popping round globes into our mouths.

…

What I really want to do is take you by the shoulders and say,

Last night I dreamed my daughter died,

and awoke with a scream in my chest

straining like a fish caught in a net.

But then I made pancakes-

the good kind, with bananas and flax seeds-

and I let her sit on my lap while we ate,

so I could smell her hair,

but still, I feel the loss of her.

Do you know— can you please tell me—

how long it will be before the scream subsides?

…

But I cannot share this.

So, I hesitate, and I say,

I clean houses.

And you politely nod and scan the room,

and the frantic fish strains at the net again.

…

Maybe I should have told you

that I used to research whales,

that I scrubbed their bones and collected their feces

and glimpsed eternity in their hallowed eyes.

Maybe I should have said that after my stepfather died, I moved to Africa,

and the palms of my hands were stained red for months,

or that I walked across Spain

and released his ashes in the wind,

and the cracked stains faded just a little.

Maybe I should have told you about the sound a melting glacier makes,

or that I am writing a book,

or that my great-grandmother was offered twenty dollars at a county fair in Nebraska

to go up in a flying machine with the Wright brothers

to prove that defying gravity

was safe enough for a child.

…

What I really want to do is take you by the hand

and tug you to the riverbank,

so we can lie down in the cool mud and fill our lungs

like our great, great, great grandparents first did

all those millions of years ago,

and laugh at the absurdity of our questions and our answers.

…

What I really want to do is feed you pancakes and smell your hair

and forget about the stories we tell ourselves.

Maybe then we could remember

that we are just time-worn fish, learning to breathe,

finding our feet on this heavy, beautiful land.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash