Subway Poems

Because it's a good time for poetry

Dear friends,

I think it’s a good time to turn to poetry. A few years back, I started writing poetry again - after a 20 year hiatus! My motivation wasn’t just the pleasure of writing. It was to shift my thinking. As a scientist, I spend a lot of time using my analytic, deductive brain rather than thinking in more playful and inductive ways. Poetry helped me reconnect with my improvisational mind and my intuition.

Below are two of my favorites from that time. They’re from a collection I called “Subway Poems” since I wrote them on my commute to work.

Warmest Wishes,

Tracy

***

Boy in Band (Poem for My Son)

Your face
At first
Minute reflections 
Then dust motes singeing tracks of light

You do not know that you are glowing
You think the light on your keyboard is merely ambient
 
But light is not empty-transparent
It’s a wonder of frenetic photons
Prism magic
Lustrous and linking you to the tiny red giant
The white dwarf
The wheeling double black hole, bending space-time
Tiny pinprick across galaxies, opening rifts
For cosmic rays to wriggle through
Strange backstreets
Charmed quarks
 
On stage now
No thought of the universal
Or of cosmic scales and endings
Just the moment
 
Darling boy, you do not know that you are glowing
You turn to the crowd and speak into the microphone

Not Shy (Poem for My Daughter)

You showed me how to gallop down east 15th street
Making sure to stop two cracks back from the corner
Like we showed you when you were three years old
 
“Faster mama, like this”
 
Hair streaming behind you
A wily shadow
“Can I tell you something?” you asked, when I caught up
Then singing to yourself, skipped away
A jubilant stone on still water
 
Lately your body has become long and solid
It makes me think of sand packed firm along the shore
Yet still fragile
Softening with the tides
 
This summer you started to think about
The kind of person you are 
with other people
“I’m not shy,“ you tell me
And I have to agree
 
But I see you, sweetheart, the many layers of you
A nautilus shell with inner swirls of glass and cloud
I think you know that you are seen and
Like to try on different suits, covered with concoctions of mirrors
I love to see them all
 
In Morro Bay
You carved your initials on a juicy, round cactus
Excited that you also wrote a T for me
Marking that we were together
Even though I sat, warm, in the car
Sheltered from the mist and wind swirling about the throat of the distracted volcano
where you played