Dostoevsky

This is the first draft of a poem I wrote this morning while reading Anthropology homework and thinking about why I act the way I do. Post comments and tell me what you think (and what you think needs changing).

working title:
Approaching whole mind

from my mother, the gift of candid speech
of laying one’s heart at the feet of another
and trusting that they will pick it up, hold it, and hand it back
rather than step on it and squish it to oblivion.

from my father, the gift of rhetoric
of building an argument
of clarity of logic, thought expressed eloquently
of the ability to turn heads with words.

I married them: the heart and the head
And I use the tools of each one (of each hemisphere)
I build towers of logic and gardens of feeling
With my mother’s purity and my father’s strength.

In the words I speak, and in the ones I write
I look for the hem of the line, the body callosum
Where the fabric of feeling and the fabric of reason
Are met, and marry and intertwine.