Michelle Menting is originally from the upper Great Lakes region where she grew up the youngest of 12 siblings in a small cabin in the north woods. She now lives in midcoast Maine.
I love the sweet humor and pathos of this poem. What messages does a 10-year-old scratch into the snow on a frozen lake? And why does she make them? Who are they for? These are the questions this poem takes on.
Sky Writing
By Michelle Menting
To shuffle boots in snow, link letters
with feet. Write frosted notes for the above,
readable only while high in flight.
Years ago, when I was pre-teen I wrote
on lake ice, scooted Sorels from letter
to letter, below a cloudless winter’s sky.
I wrote, HI UP THERE and HELP, THE FISH
ARE FROZEN or LAND HERE and I ♥BOBBY
the boy with the curls. My audience
was birds – bewildered chickadees,
lost geese, late ducks lounging
out past the holidays, and jets
that circled and screeched, wrote back
in return just loops of foreign cursive – doodles
frozen fish could not answer.
But that 10-year-old girl, rural and quiet,
thought: there, finally, contact.
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is Portland’s poet laureate. This column is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2008 Michelle Menting. It appeared in “Diagram,” 2008, and appears here by permission of the author.
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