Passions in poems
weapons made from words
bouncing off my walls
like dozens of gray birds.
Birds? Flying freely, caged and captured,
pale couriers flying over green pastures.
Green means clean, or natural, new, nice.
The first grass of Spring, home to gray mice.
What do mice symbolize in story and rhyme?
Hidden, heinous, and honest—most of the time.
Now time,
there’s a topic that will never grow old.
It waits over both till life takes its toll.
What am I writing—what am I saying,
poems have purpose, pick one and play it:
“Green painted birds—parrots—plunge to the pasture
snatching gray mice, erasing them soon after.”
That’s the best I’ll get from the gray and green thoughts
scattered in my sky like disconnected dots.
You could probably tell just from the title that this one is a bit of a riddle. I don't want to fully explain it, I think some of the fun and art in poetry is allowing other people to interpret it and find meaning it, but I should probably give some insight into what I was thinking when I wrote it. If you'd rather come up with your own interpretation, stop reading here. With a lot of my poems, I write them after getting a sort of "feeling", something that tells me I have an idea or emotion to write. For this poem, I had that feeling but felt somewhat distracted and conflicted, and started having random thoughts that distracted me from writing (green parrots for some reason). I started writing anyway, and as some of the lines formed (it started a lot differently than it ended up) I kept having this desire to turn away from writing what I was feeling. It was weird, and as the poem unfolded, I started seeing that, just like how the birds started out gray and then ended up as green parrots, I was trying to alter or cover up what I felt in order to make it more presentable. Worse still, I was only "parroting" good or normal thoughts and trying to hide or erase the "gray mice" in the pasture of my mind. It can be really hard to be honest and open about how we're feeling, and at its core, that's what this poem is about. Everyone wants to be "green": clean, natural, new, and nice. But the reality is that we all have gray birds and gray mice in our pastures that need to be dealt with. But rather than painting our birds green and erasing our mice, we should acknowledge the state we're in and be open about it. In my experience that's the best way to heal. So yeah, there's my mini-essay on this poem, I hope I didn't ruin it for you.
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