September 2018
I'm now a Vermont poet. Reading great New England poets who know this place with its rock walls, night storms, snowfall, and grateful to have found a community of poets in the Otter Creek Poetry group. My most recent collection of poetry, How I Learned To Be White from Antrim House (2018) just received the Gold Prize for Poetry Book Category for Motivational Poetry in the Human Relations Indie Book Prize for 2018. I don't write for prizes, I wrote to understand my white privilege.
Clock It Up to Experience
Your lost temper.
Eating-at-you anger.
The betrayal you dealt
to the joker. Sadness
where you can’t yank
shut the night’s shades
against daredevil winds.
There’s no chalk on this walk,
no hopscotch hoops you jump through,
or blurred edges on crumbling concrete
in pastel hues the rain melts.
No classroom eraser to clap
to blow off dust of a hand-drawn
maze with wobbly lines.
Those tin hands, even a digital rollover,
carry you forward. The engine that pulls
out of the station on its own timetable
lurches you – a ride to the next
waiting platform.
© 2018 Tricia Knoll
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