(PROSE POEM)
HANG ON, LITTLE TOMATO
for Lydia, who brightens the days of many
M. ANN REED
HANG ON, LITTLE TOMATO
for Lydia, who brightens the days of many
M. ANN REED
I am six, five, four, three, two, one, going on one-hundred-fifty-thousand years old. Every day is a birthday. So the dates on the new gravestone, 1928 – 2015, confuse me. I read the credits: Minoan Sisterhood Founder, Traveler, Artist, Mystic, Human-i-tar-ian (another dinosaur?) Epi-curean (from ‘cure’? a physician?) Culinary Artist, Social Activist for Peace, Women’s Rights, Caring Economics, and Cultural Trans-form-a-tion. What are my credits? I am gullible. I am a crisis. (Everyone laughed with me when I used these new words in sentences – even my teacher who said I am getting to know myself. That Socrates would be proud of me.) A photographer pauses perplexed (my new word). Like she may or may not snap my picture. She studies me – makes me aware that I am still in my black leotard and pink tutu – that my black hair hangs wild and loose past my shoulders – that ballet class had been rigorous (my favorite new word) – that my energy is stronger. My ballet teacher notices that I sit like a Tai Chi Master, legs in wide, open second position, feet firmly planted like the pine tree. When I sit like that, I feel more open-minded, yet kind of vulnerable. I am still four feet, three inches. My height on the library reading scale still places me in the primary reading group. When I reach my arm high over my head, my height is way beyond the top reading level. Then I feel almost the way I did when I met a bear at Yellowstone this summer: terrified, exhilarated.
M. Ann Reed is a contemplative scholar, poet, Chinese calligrapher-brush painter and professor of English Literature and Theory of Knowledge who has taught in Malaysia, Ukraine, Bosnia-Herzegovina, China and the USA. Her postdoctoral research studies the mending arts of Early Modern English and Contemporary Poetry. Her Chinese calligraphy and brush paintings have been exhibited in Portland, Oregon and at the Shenzhen Fine Arts Museum in China. Her poems have been published in various literary journals.