Sunday Poem #3: The Things You Fear the Most
A poem for the childhood survivors.
Happy Sunday, friends. Here’s a poem from my first book, Ruins & Kingdoms. If you prefer to listen, I’m experimenting with including an audio reading. (I’ll use a better mic next time. 😅)
The Things You Fear the Most
“Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O’ Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life.” — Anne Lamott
If you want to write you must
first go back to childhood.
Find that time you fell,
or woke to dreams of monsters,
or emerged from the magical world
between shirt racks
to find your mother had vanished.
In those pale pre-dawn memories are the fears,
the shadows that chased you
into your grown-up life.
In there are the seeds
you bring back to plant
into towering, sheltering forests.
The things you fear the most
are the only things you have.
One of the delights of writing poetry for a long time is sometimes a new friend picks up a copy of your old book, and they share a little poem on Instagram, and you think “Wow, I wrote that? I forgot about that one.” When I wrote this poem, I honestly think I was intellectually riffing on Anne Lamott’s quote more than digging into my own experience.
If I could redo this, maybe I would get more specific about fears I felt as a kid — the exact moment in All Dogs Go to Heaven that freaked me out, or the time I had a meltdown in the tunnel slide at Chuck E. Cheese. They’re kind of funny anecdotes now, but I am also old enough to see how those fears show up in my grown up life, still lurking like monsters under the bed.
(For one thing, I can almost draw a line between the Chuck E. Cheese incident and my recently acquired car wash anxiety, but that’s a story for another day.)
I’m also old enough to recognize that I was gifted safety in those moments. My mom whisking a scared 6 year old out of the movie theater, my dad at the bottom of a slide encouraging me to keep moving forward. Perhaps reflecting on them opens up a compassionate way forward.
I suppose that’s the work of writing. Revisiting our stories. Making meaning. Carrying those seeds of the past into the present and nurturing them into something new for the future.
Love ❤️