Poem

I'm teaching poetry in my adult class right now, and we have been focusing on "showing, not telling", a very similar adage for anyone who has taken a creative writing class before in college.   A resolution that I always have for myself and that I often fall short of is to write more poems, stories, anything really.

For a warm-up exercise last week, I showed a picture that I had taken in Yangon, Myanmar, and had the students "show" the picture through writing.  The picture, and the moment it captures, are bewitching and mysterious to me.  I attempted to put the feeling into writing:

Father and Son
under bright clouds
father and son stand
fields of wet, angry green behind
the air is sharp, like a lover's slap

they stand
back to back
like distrusting allies in battle
deciding who will act next