Old Bricks

Poem No. 133

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:

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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.

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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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