The idea of slow weathering by wind, water, and time has always had a romantic appeal for me — I love sea glass, and bent trees, and old maps of the places rivers used to be.
One of the prompts for the 2022 February Poetry Adventure was ‘bricks’, and this is the poem it inspired:
Old Bricks
I wish to buy a house of new brick and live there with you three hundred autumns growing soft and ivy-covered losing edges to the rain.
Poetry, for me, is largely a process of editing — a type of erosion or weathering, I suppose. And it’s funny how the editing process can sometimes hang on a single word for a long time.
At first, this poem read “a hundred autumns,” because it sounded poetic to me the day I wrote it. (You can read that first public version on my Instagram, signed with an old pen name of mine. 😊)
But the poem wasn’t true yet. If allowed, I would live with Petra until the stars burn out. So the poem drifted, over two years of editing, from “a hundred” to “five hundred autumns” to “a thousand” to “ten thousand” to “for all of the autumns,” which… may be true, but really wasn’t working for me.
Eventually I realized the problem lay in the abstraction. The bigger the number, the more factual but less impactful. Empty of emotion, somehow.
But “three hundred autumns”?
For me, that one word — far too small for the heart, far too big for the body — finally lets the poem say what it means.
Thanks for reading (and letting me ramble a bit about editing poems 🤣),
~ A
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I love that it is the house, the bricks, and the couple inside it who lose their edges, grow soft and old together. Beautiful.
This is so lovely. The notion of a new house to grow old with is wonderfully mossy and organic. I think it could be the first of a series. Would you plant a new garden? A tree? Build a wall along the lane, one rock a day? Really love this one. Thanks for sharing.