Someone

Someone

Tacked

to the corner

telephone pole,

someone

left a single-word sign.

On gold cardstock,

red calligraphy proclaims

Poetry

Slippery sheet protectors

shield Emily Dickinson,

Jackson Holly, Basho  

from sizzling summer sun,

wind, monsoon rains.

Filling

a cornflower blue
 ceramic glazed pot 

with Veronica spicata,

magenta Petunias, gold Celosia,

I set it

on the adobe ledge

in front of my home.

                                 ©2013 Terranda King

Fastened with binder clips to two clipboards are six poems. On the bottom clipboard, the page reads “KIDS” parallel to its left-hand edge and includes a poem about “a snail upon the wall.” No poet is named. I wonder if “Someone” wrote it.

The sign and poems have been there for months. I meant to stop. Before I did, they disappeared, and I was disappointed. Perhaps they announced a local poetry reading/writing group I could attend. Recently, the sign and poems reappeared. Today, I stopped and received the gift I'd already been given, the gift waiting for me. How many gifts await our receptivity? What difference will their contribution make? There’s no way to know who stops, how many read the poems or how they respond. The act of leaving them there seems whimsical, generously free of attachment. 

  

Almost all the poems are about nature, the night, a flowering tree, a snake and a snail, appropriate since they are posted on the street leading to the Rio Grande Nature Center. Familiar with Basho and Emily Dickinson, I had not heard of Jackson Holly. A little internet research to find his two poems led to music videos of a Jackson Holly playing guitar and singing a blues version of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” He could be the “Someone,” I’m just not sure. If so, in these days of social media platforms, poems posted on telephone poles really are “stealth marketing.” How many people are curious enough to spend time tracking him down? Looking in his mirror, I wonder how difficult I make it for others to experience the essence of me.

The experience inspired me to express my own creativity. Since I haven’t written poetry for a long time, it was a real treat to do that. The experience made me wonder if I give anonymous (more or less!) gifts of love to unknown strangers. It made me wonder what those gifts might be. It made me wonder how I can give them more consciously, more often. It made me wonder what the world would be like if more of us did. I think we all give gifts of love to unknown strangers. I think we do it every day by showing up as who we are. Sometimes we don’t recognize how just being ourselves makes a difference, how it is a gift to others.

During my recent trip to California, dear friends in real estate had me stay at their home. They organized a Sunday afternoon BBQ, inviting people I worked with 15 - 20 years ago. It was a unique experience for me. For the first time in my life, I felt an intangible sense of perspective in time – it must come with age. I could feel the relationship I had with each person, the contributions we made to each other. It was a warm, soft, expansive feeling in my chest. One man has had extraordinary success in real estate over the years. Last year, he sold 250 short-sale and foreclosure homes. He told me that when he was new in the business, a bright young man with an MBA from Northwestern University, but a stranger to me, I was his mentor without knowing it. He told me he followed me around the office, listening to what I said, watching what I did. His telling me about the difference I made in his life was his contribution to me. Aware consciously of our contributions or not, we can be confident we make them, and that we have a choice about making them consciously.