An Experiment

"I am writing left handed," she said as she bit her tongue bloody.
"I wish to feel the child in me again - being forced to attend to my movements
in every detail . . . I want to dance like a child
with the raw motions of the embryo flying through the thick dark spaces
before his dawning time. . .
biding his time in peace and comfort. . . in the music of the heartbeat . . .
and then great shining hallways will call to me, and they will
sing their sonorous tunes encouraging me
to fling myself as a child down to the shadowy places at the ends. . .
and I will revel in all of my youthful memories, maybe grown faded,
but I remember, and I want to go back there to those sunny days."
She wrote laboriously, forgetting how to spell . . .  and her words
looked like the scribblings of a wayward ant.
"I want to dive into life," she whispered softly to the smudgy paper on
her desk .  . her slippery pencil moving too quickly for a newly left-handed writer, 
and her words flowed too fast for her to catch and she began to cry . . .
her pencil seeming to have a mind and a purpose all his own. . .
"I want," she muttered and cleared her throat . . . "I want," 
she announced a little louder and a little more determinedly. . .
"I want to believe again,
to believe in fairies and miracles
and all the possibilities
of life . .  . I want to giggle at
all the silliness of giants.. .. ..
I want to climb trees again,
I want to have a best friend, like I used to, someone
to tell secrets with. . .
I want to have the time to
watch a spider weave her web, all in one afternoon . . .
and drink sparkling dew drops from marigolds
growing on a pile of garden dirt covering a buried treasure,
something to dig for, something to search for . . .
I want to color outside the lines and live inside a cardboard box
for a whole morning, while nobody is looking for me,
then stare at the sky for hours, while lying in the tall grass,
listening to the crickets, until I start to hunt for them . . . they make nice pets," she remembered fondly,
"I used to watch ant hills for hours, imagining I was their queen, I felt like the queen of something . . . or maybe nothing, no responsibilities to deny me. . .
and then
I want to spend a day chasing
rainbows . . .
I want to live again,"
she stopped and stared in dawning wonder
as her pencil poised itself over a clean space on the white paper,
slowed just for a moment in thought, and then posed the question. . .
"What is stopping you?"

##

A friend of mine, Laura, who is also a poet and artist, http://moineauenfrance.blogspot.com/ suggested we try writing a poem a day, left-handed, in order
to force the right side of our brain to kick in . .. perhaps to give a fresh aspect to our writings so here is the first of my poems written left handed on paper .. .. what a chore . . .
how many times I felt like giving up and taking the pencil in my right hand . . . I should scan the writing and post it here. I'm not sure that I am more creative in any way but my poem is quite different from what I usually write . . . I think its more like a narrative . . . but I like it so it stays.